VMware unveils four new tools in Europe

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VMware, the virtualisation vendor, has announced the launch of four new virtual machine management products at its first European

VMworld user conference, being held in Cannes, France this week.

The new tools are designed to increase levels of automation in IT service delivery and business continuity for VMware virtualised data centres, by eliminating previously error-prone, slow and manual processes.

The vendor said the new management products are designed to take advantage of the mobility and manageability characteristics of virtual machines running on the VMware Infrastructure platform, while integration with its VMotion software for managing migration and optimisation tasks will provide a uniform way to capture and automate processes.

Raghu Raghuram, VMware vice president of products and solutions said: "Automation is the next stage for the virtual data centre." And he added that the new VMware products would increase IT administrator productivity by preventing virtual machine sprawl and allowing business users to self-provision capacity on demand. He also said their focus on business continuity also deliver higher levels of resiliency to software applications running in VMware virtual machines.

The four new products are VMware Lab Manager, which is available now, and Lifecycle Manager, Stage Manager and Site Recovery Manager, which are slated to be available by the second quarter of this year.

Lab Manager is for ad-hoc development data centre resource provisioning, Lifecycle Manager helps with requesting, approving, deploying, updating, and retiring virtual machines in a consistent and automated way and Stage Manager speeds up the time taken to test applications and get them into a virtual production environment, VMware said. Those first three all broadly focus on IT service delivery, extending the capability of the virtual machines and VMotion to automate the entire service delivery lifecycle.

For Business Continuity, VMware Site Recovery Manager, is aimed at making disaster recovery more rapid, reliable, and manageable, using hardware - and operating system - independent mobile virtual machines to deliver centralised management of recovery plans, automated recovery processes and better testing of recovery plans.

IDC research director, Stephen Elliot said: "As IT organisations expand their virtualised production environments, automation offers an opportunity to extend the initial virtualisation ROI [return on investment], while deploying IT services quickly and in strict compliance with IT standards and policies."

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