www.vExperienced.co.uk

In this article I’m going to talk about Zerto, a data protection company specialising in virtualized and cloud infrastructures who I recently saw as part of Storage Field Day #2. They’ve presented twice before at Tech Field Days (as part of their launch in June 2011 and Feb 2012) so I was interested to see what new developments (if any) were in store for us. In their own words;

Zerto provides large enterprises with data replication solutions designed specifically for virtualized infrastructure and the cloud. Zerto Virtual Replication is the industry’s first hypervisor-based replication solution for tier-one applications, replacing traditional array-based BC/DR solutions that were not built to deal with the virtual paradigm.

When I first heard the above description I couldn’t help but think of VMware’s SRM product which has been available since June 2008. Zerto’s carefully worded statement is correct in that SRM relies on storage array replication for maximum functionality but I still think it’s slightly disingeneous. To be fair VMware are equally disingeneous when they claim “the only truly hypervisor level replication engine available today” for their vSphere Replication technology – marketing will be marketing! Later in this article I’ll clarify the differences between these products but let’s start by looking at what Zerto offers.

Zerto offer a product called Zerto Virtual Replication which integrates with vCenter to replicate your VMware VMs to one or more sites in a simple and easy to use manner. Since July 30th 2012 when v2.0 was released it supports replication to various clouds along with advanced features such as multisite replication and vCloud Director compatibility. Zerto are on an aggressive release schedule given that the initial release (which won ‘Best of Show’ at VMworld 2011) was only a year earlier but in a fast moving market that’s a good thing. For an entertaining 90 second introduction which explains what if offers better than I could check out the video below from the companies website;

Just as server virtualization opened up possibilities by abstracting the guest OS from the underlying hardware so data replication can benefit from moving ‘up the stack’ away from the storage array hardware and into the hypervisor. The extra layer of abstraction lifts certain constraints related to the storage layer;

• Array agnostic – you can replicate between dissimilar storage arrays (for example Netapp at one end and EMC at the other). For both cloud and DR scenarios this could be a ‘make or break’ distinction compared to traditional array replication which requires similar systems at both ends. In fact you can replicate to local storage if you want – if you’re one of the growing believers in the NoSAN movement that could be useful…
• Storage layout agnostic – because you choose which VMs to replicate rather than which volume/LUN on the array you’re less constrained when designing or maintaining your storage layout. When replicating you can also change between thin and thick provisioning, or from SAN to NAS, or from one datastore layout to another. A typical use case might be to replicate from thick at the source to thin provisioning at the DR location for example. There is a definite trend towards VM-aware storage and ditching LUN constraints – you see it with VMware’s vVols, storage arrays like Tintri and storage hypervisors like Virsto so having the same liberating concept for DR makes a lot of sense.

Zerto goes further than just being ‘storage agnostic’ as it allows further flexibility;

• Replicate VMs from vCD to vSphere (or vice versa). vCD to vCD is also supported. This is impressive stuff as it understands the Organization Networks, vApp containers etc and creates whatever’s needed to replicate the VMs.
• vSphere version agnostic – for example use vSphere 4.1 at one end and vSphere 5.0 at the other. For large companies which can typically lag behind this could be the prime reason to adopt Zerto.

With any replication technology bandwidth and latency are concerns as is WAN utilisation. Zerto uses virtual appliances on the source and destination hosts (combined with some VMware API calls, not a driver as this article states) and therefore isn’t dependent on changed block tracking (CBT), is storage protocol agnostic (ie you can use FC, iSCSI or NFS for your datastores) and offers compression and optimisation to boot. Zerto provide a profiling tool to ‘benchmark’ the rate of change per VM before you enable replication, thus alllowing you to predict your replication bandwidth requirements. Storage I/O control (SIOC) is not supported today although Zerto are implementing their own functionality to allow you to limit replication bandwidth. Today it’s done on a ‘per site’ basis although there’s no scheduling facility so you can’t set different limits during the day or at weekends.

VMware’s vSphere is the only hypervisor supported today although we were told the roadmap includes others (but no date was given). With Hyper-V v3 getting a good reception I’d expect to see support for it sooner than later and that could open up some interesting options.

Zerto’s Virtual Replication vs VMware’s SRM

Let’s revisit that claim that Zerto is the “industry’s first hypervisor-based replication solution for tier-one applications“. With the advent of vSphere 5.1 VMware now have two solutions which could be compared to Zerto – vSphere Replication and SRM. The former is bundled free with vSphere but is not comparable – it’s quite limited (no orchestration, testing, reporting or enterprise-class DR functions) and only really intended for data protection not full DR. SRM on the other hand is very much competition for Zerto although for comparable functionality you require array level replication.

When I mentioned SRM to the Zerto guys they were quick to say it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison which to a point is true – with Zerto you specify individual or groups of VMs to replicate whereas with SRM you’re still stuck specifying volumes or LUNs at array level. Both products have their respective strengths but there’s a large overlap in functionality and many people will want to compare them. SRM is very well known and has the advantage of VMware’s backing and promotion – having a single ‘throat to choke’ is an attractive proposition for many. I’m not going to list the differences because others have already done all the hard work;

Zerto compared to vSphere Replication - the official Zerto blog

Zerto compared to Site Recovery Manager - a great comparison by Marcel Van den Berg (also includes VirtualSharp’s Reliable DR)

Looking through the comparisons with SRM there are quite a few areas where Zerto has an advantage although to put it in context check out the pricing comparison at the end of this article;
NOTE: Since the above comparison was written SRM v5.1 has added support for vSphere Essentials Plus but everything else remains accurate

• RTO in the low seconds rather than 15 mins
• Compression of replication traffic
• No resync required after host failures
• Consistency groups
• Cloning of the DR VMs for testing
• Point in time recovery (up to a max of 5 days)
• The ability to flag a VMDK as a pagefile disk. In this instance it will be replicated once (and then stopped) so that during recovery a disk is mounted but no replication bandwidth is required. SRM can’t do this and it’s very annoying!
• vApps supported (and automatically updated when the vApp changes)
• vCloud Director compatibility

If you already have storage array replication then you’ll probably want to evaluate Zerto and SRM.
If you don’t have (or want the cost of) array replication or want the flexibility of specifying everthing in the hypervisor then Zerto is likely to be the best solution.

DR to the Cloud (DRaaS)

Of particular interest to some customers and a huge win for Zerto is the ability to recover to the cloud. Building on the flexibility to replicate to any storage array and to abstract the underlying storage layout allows you to replicate to any provider who’s signed up to Zerto’s solution. Multisite and multitenancy functionality was introduced in v2.0 and today there are over 30 cloud providers signed up including some of the big guys like Terremark, Colt, and Bluelock. Zerto have tackled the challenges of a single appliance (providers obviously wouldn’t want to run one per customer) providing secure multi-tenant replication with resource management included.

vCloud Director compatibility is another feather in Zerto’s cap, especially when you consider that VMware’s own ‘vCloud Suite’ lags behind (SRM only has limited support for vCD). One has to assume that this will be a short term advantage as VMware have promised tighter integration between their products.

Pricing

Often this is what it comes down to – you can have the best solution in the market but if you’re charging the most then that’s what people expect. Zerto are targeting the enterprise so maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that they’re also priced at the top end of the market. The table below shows pricing for SRM (both Standard and Enterprise edition) and Zerto;

As you can see Zerto costs a significant premium over SRM. When making that comparison you may need to factor in the cost of storage array replication as SRM using vSphere Replication is severely limited. These are all list prices so get your negotiating hat on! We were told that Zerto were seeing good adoption from all sizes of customer from 15VMs through to service providers.

Final thoughts

I’ve not used SRM in production since the early v1.0 days and I’ve not used Zerto in production either so my thoughts are based purely on what I’ve read and been shown. I was very impressed with Zerto’s solution which certainly looks very polished and obviously trumps SRM in a few areas – hence why I took the time to investigate and write up my findings in this blogpost. From a simple and quick appliance based installation (which was shown in a live demo to us) through to the GUI and even the pricing model Zerto’s aim is to keep things simple and it looks as if they’ve succeeded (despite quite a bit of complexity under the hood). If you’re in the market for a DR solution take time to review the comparison with SRM above and see which fits your requirements and budget. Given how comprehensive the feature set is I wouldn’t be surprised to see this come out on top over SRM for many customers despite VMware’s backing for SRM and the cost differential.

Multi-hypervisor management could be a ‘killer feature’ for Zerto. It would distinguish the product for the forseeable future (I’d be surprised to see this in VMware’s roadmap anytime soon despite their more hypervisor friendly stance) and needs to happen before VMware bake comparable functionality into the SRM product. Looking at they way VMware are increasingly bundling software to leverage the base vSphere product there’s a risk that SRM features work their way down the stack and into lower priced SKU’s – good for customers but a challenge for Zerto. There’s definitely intriguing possibilities though – how about replicating from VMware to Hyper-V for example? As the use of cloud infrastructure increases the ability to run across heteregenous infrastructures will become key and Zerto have a good start in this space with their DRaaS offering. If you don’t want to wait and you’re interested in multi-hypervisor management (and conversion) today check out Hotlink (thanks to my fellow SFD#2 delegates for that tip).

I see a slight challenge in Zerto targeting the enterprise specifically. Typically these larger companies will already have storage array replication and are more likely to have a mixture of virtual and physical and therefore will still need array functionality for physical applications. This erodes the value proposition for Zerto. Furthermore if you have separate storage and virtualisation teams then moving replication away from the storage array could break accepted processes not to mention put noses out of joint! Replication at the storage array is a well accepted and mature technology whereas virtualisation solutions still have to prove themselves in some quarters. In contrast VMware’s SRM may be seen to offer the best of both worlds by offering the choice of both hypervisor and/or array replication – albeit with a significantly less powerful replication engine (if using vSphere Replication) and with the aforementioned constaints around replicating LUNs rather than VMs. Zerto also have the usual challenges around convincing enterprises that as a ‘startup’ they’re able to provide the expected level of support – for an eloquent answer to this read ‘Small is beautiful’ by Sudheesh Nair on the Nutanix blog (who face the same challenges).

Disclosure: the Storage Field Day #2 event is sponsored by the companies we visit, including flight and hotel, but we are in no way obligated to write (either positively or negatively) about the sponsors.

Further Reading

Steve Foskett and Gabrie Van Zanten discuss Zerto (from VMworld 2012)

Good introduction to Zerto v1.0 (Marcel Van Den Berg)

Zerto and vSphere Host replication – what’s the difference?

Zerto vs SRM (and VirtualSharp’s ReliableDR)

Step away from the array – fun Zerto blog in true Dr Seuss style

vBrownbag Zerto demo from VMworld Barcelona 2012

Zerto replication and disaster recovery the easy way

Take two Zerto and call me in the morning (Chris Wahl from a previous TFD)

Musings of Rodos – Zerto (Rodney Haywood from a previous TFD)

451 group’s report on Zerto (March 2012)

Storage field day #2 coverage

Twitter contacts

@zertocorp – the official Zerto twitter account

Shannon Snowdon – Senior Technical Marketing Architect

@zertojjones – another Zerto employee

In the first part of this series I introduced vCOps and it’s requirements before covering the new features in part two. This final blogpost covers the capacity features (available in the Advanced and higher editions) along with pricing information and my conclusions.

The previous trial I used didn’t include the capacity planning elements so I was keen to try this out. I’d used CapacityIQ previously (although only briefly) and found it useful but combined with the powerful analytics in vCOps it promises to be an even more compelling solution. VMware have created four videos with Ben Scheerer from the vCOps product team – they’re focused on capacity but if you’ve watched Kit Colbert’s overview much of it will be familiar;

• New dashboards (9 mins)
• Drilldown and Alerts (14 mins)
• Heat maps and Event Management (9 mins)
• What If scenarios (3 mins)

UPDATE APRIL 2012 – VMware have just launched 2.5 hrs of free training for vCOps!

If you don’t have time to watch the videos and read the documentation (section 4 in the Advanced Getting Started guide) here’s the key takeaways;

• Capacity information is integrated throughout the product although modelling is primarily found under the ‘Planning’ view. Almost every view has some capacity information included either via the dynamic thresholds (which indicate the standard capacity used) or popup graphs of usage and trending.
• Storage is now included in the capacity calculations (an improvement over CapacityIQ) resulting in a more complete analysis. Datastores are now shown in the Operations view although if you’re like me and use NFS direct to the guest OS it’s not going to be as comprehensive as using block protocols.
• the capacity tools require more tailoring to your environment than the performance aspects but provide valuable information
• With vCOps you can both view existing and predicted capacity and you can model changes like adding hosts or VMs.

Read more…

In part one of Using vCenter Operations I covered what the product does along with the different versions available and deployment considerations. In this post I’ll delve into what’s new and improved and in the final part I’ll cover capacity features, product pricing, and my overall conclusions. I had intended to cover the configuration management and application dependency features too but it’s such a big product I’ll have to write another blogpost or I’ll never finish!

Introductory learning materials

• Watch VMware’s overview of vCOPS video by Kit Colbert, the principal architect behind the product. At 25 minutes it’s a great overview and well worth a watch.
• The evaluation guide (fairly basic and largely covers installation with a few use cases at the end)
• You should also check out the vCOps evaluation site for extra resources

UPDATE APRIL 2012 – VMware have just launched 2.5 hrs of free training for vCOps.

Deep dive learning materials;

• The Advanced Getting Started guide is more detailed than its title would imply and is worth working your way through during the trial
• If you’re planning on using the Advanced or Enterprise product I’d recommend the training materials posted by Ivan Rahabok.
• Check out Ivan’s website,virtual- red-dot for detailed (technical) info about vCOps.

What’s new and improved in vCOps

Monitoring is a core feature and for some people the only one they’re concerned about. As the size of your infrastructure grows and becomes more complex the need for a tool to combine compute, network, and storage in real time also grows. Here are my key takeaways;

• there’s a new dashboard screen which shows health (immediate issues), risks (upcoming issues) and efficiency (opportunity for improvements) in a single screen. The dashboard can provide a high level view of your infrastructure and works nicely on a plasma screen as your ‘traffic light’ view of the virtual world (and physical if you go with Enterprise+). The dashboard can also be targeted at the datacenter, cluster, host or VM level which I found very useful although you can only customise the dashboard in Enterprise versions. There is still the Operations view (the main view in vCOPS v1) which now also includes datastores. This view scales extremely well – even if you have thousands of VMs and datastores across multiple vCenters they can all be displayed on a single screen.
  NOTE: If you find some or all of your datastores show up as grey with no data (as mine did) there is a hotfix available via VMware support.
• Read more…

At VMworld 2011 in Copenhagen VMware unveiled a significant revamp of their management suites, including a new version of vCenter Operations Manager (v5 to align with the vSphere release). vCenter Operations is now a suite of tools which includes vCenter Configuration Manager, the new vCenter Infrastructure Navigator (which I’ll cover in a later blogpost) and vCenter CapacityIQ (which is now fully integrated into vCOps, the standalone CapacityIQ is now end of life).

Although announced at VMworld it wasn’t publicly available until Jan 2012 when VMware formally launched vCOps v5. Coming less than a year after the release of the first version it’s apparent that VMware see this as an important product which is evolving fast. Steven Herrod, VMware’s CIO stated recently at the Italian VMUG (around the 5 minute mark) that vCOps ‘is becoming the most adopted new technology that VMware has ever had’. The vCenter Operations suite is still aimed at infrastructure monitoring as opposed to application monitoring (despite the addition of Infrastructure Navigator) – VMware’s solutions aimed at the application tier belong to the vFabric suite. For a good overview of where vCOps and vFabric Hyperic fit into VMware’s cloud suite read Dave Hill’s blogpost on the subject.

If you aren’t familiar with vCenter Operations here are the kind of problems it aims to address;

• Is your virtual infrastructure healthy?
• What serious problems should I address immediately?
• Is the workload in my environment normal?
• Am I using the resources in my environment efficiently?
• How long do I have before resources run out?
• What impact did a recent change have?

A few people have already posted articles which I’d recommend reading;

• David Davis has a great review including available versions, top 5 new features and his conclusions
• Julian Wood posted a good summary along with his initial thoughts
• VMware’s official blogpost about the new features
  
• My review of the first version of vCOps. A year on it’s still got a few good points and is a good intro to the product

With v1.0 I concluded that it was a great product but there were a few reasons why it wasn’t for me, primarily the lack of email notifications and pricing. In this post I’ll cover the requirements and deployment considerations for the new version and in part two I’ll cover day to day use and new features. The final part will cover the capacity features along with info about pricing and my conclusions.

UPDATE APRIL 2012 – VMware have just launched 2.5 hrs of free training for vCOps.

Read more…

What is vBenchmark?

Last week VMware released their latest fling (an unsupported) utility called vBenchmark. According to the website;

vBenchmark measures the performance of a VMware virtualized infrastructure across three categories:

• Efficiency: for example, how much physical RAM are you saving by using virtualization?
• Operational Agility: for example, how much time do you take on average to provision a VM?
• Quality of Service: for example, how much downtime do you avoid by using availability features?

Is it worth deploying?

The answer will depend largely on whether you need metrics and, if you do, what tools or metrics you already have for your virtual infrastructure.

• Do you know your vRAM usage given the new licensing scheme for vSphere5?
• Do you struggle to justify the purchase of a new host?
• Do you need to quantify the benefits of svMotion?

If you already run Veeam Monitor, vKernel’s vOperations or even vCenter Operations you may already have all the ‘ammo’ you need, but even though those tools can provide the information it’s sometimes hard to see the wood for the trees. vBenchmark is very simple but that’s its strength – it’s free, easy and quick to setup (it’s supplied in .OVF format) and gives you some useful (and some not so useful) information right away.

Having just upgraded to vSphere5 I was curious to see how much vRAM we were using. The licence portal in vCenter doesn’t do a very good job and only shows an overall view. vBenchmark lets you break down the statistics to various levels, of which per cluster I found the most useful;

vRAM as shown in vBenchmark

Read more…

After moving my blog to a new hosting provider last month I was reviewing the WordPress plugins I use and I found myself wondering if Alex Gorbatchev’s SyntaxHighlighter supported PowerCLI. The WordPress plugin I use (courtesy of Alex Bond) had a Powershell plugin but no PowerCLI. Time to create! I’m by no means the first person to extend this plugin and I quickly realised there were two options;

• upload a new ‘brush’ file to overwrite the existing Powershell brush. That change would be lost however if you upgraded the WordPress plugin and with the imminent release of Powershell v3 it could also be lost if the original Powershell brush was updated.
• write an extra plugin which includes the new language. I felt this was a bit more work, but generally the better solution (plus I was half doing this to learn more about WordPress and the plugin structure). With clear guidance on how to create new languages the hard work was already done.

The result is my WordPress plugin for PowerCLI syntax highlighting which includes;

• PowerCLI cmdlets up to v5.01 (including AutoDeploy, ImageBuilder, vCD etc)
• VMware Update Manager cmdlets
• The vSphere PowerCLI Reference book cmdlets.

Read more…

UPDATE FEB 2012 – After some further testing I’ve concluded that this is a bigger pain than I previously thought. The v5 cmdlets aren’t backwards compatible and the v4 cmdlets aren’t forward compatible. This means that while you’re running a mixed environment with VMs on v4/v5 VMtools a single script can’t run against them all. Think audit scripts, AV update scripts etc. You’ll have to run the script twice, from two different workstations, one running PowerCLI v4 (against the v4 VMs) and one running PowerCLI v5 (against the v5 VMs). And I thought this was meant to be an improvement??

———- original article ————–

There are quite a few enhancements in PowerCLI v5 (there’s a good summary at Julian Wood’s site) but if you make use of the guest OS cmdlets proceed with caution!

We have an automated provisioning script which we use to build new virtual servers. This does everything from provisioning storage on our backend Netapps to creating the VM and customising configuration inside the guest OS. The guest OS configuration makes use of the ‘VMGuest’ family  of cmdlets;

• Invoke-VMScript
• Copy-VMGuestFile
• Get-VMGuest, Restart-VMGuest etc

Unfortunately since upgrading to vSphere5 and PowerCLI v5 we’ve discovered that the guest OS cmdlets are NOT backwards compatible! This means if you upgrade to PowerCLI v5 but your hosts aren’t running ESXiv5 and more importantly the VMTools aren’t the most up to date version any calls using the v5 cmdlets (such as Invoke-VMGuest) will no longer work. Presumably this is due to the integration of the VIX API into the base vSphere API – I’m guessing the new cmdlets (via the VMTools interface) now require the built-in API as a prerequisite.

As PowerCLI is a client side install the workaround is to have a separate install (on another PC for example) which still runs PowerCLI v4, but we have our vCenter server setup as a central scripting station (it’s simpler than every member of the team keeping up with releases, plugins etc) so this is definitely not ideal.

This is covered in VMware KB2010065.The PowerCLI v5 release notes are also worth a read.

Further Reading

Will Invoke-VMGuest work? (LucD)

After being asked why I blog by a co-worker I’ve been thinking about what motivates me to blog. An inspirational blogpost by Mark Pollard on how to get into strategy identifies some traits which strike me as equally applicable to blogging;

1. Curiosity. This is partly why I got into blogging as the techie in me wanted to know how it worked, which technologies were involved, what was that plugin that other bloggers were referring to? It’s the same instinct that makes good engineers – they want to know how something works so they take it apart!
2. Action. Like most technologies the only way to really understand it is to get stuck in and do it. Until I started my blog I wasn’t sure what I’d blog about but I quickly found myself thinking ‘that might be interesting to others’ during my working day and I started turning thoughts into blogposts. I agree wholeheartedly with Seth Godin’s view that the process of distilling your thoughts into something readable for others is a very valuable process, and reason enough to blog – even if nobody reads it. Read more…

Today was officially the start of VMworld Copenhagen even though many people were here yesterday for partner day. The hands on labs are always popular at VMworld shows, and for all the reasons previously covered by others. I’ve done two labs so far (HOL01, Creating the Hybrid Cloud and HOL27, Netapp and VMware) which were both useful in different ways. There’s a good atmosphere and the technology behind the labs continues to evolve – this year vCenter Operations (and I think Netapp Insight Balance) are on display showing how the lab infrastructure is performing. There are more seats and the labs are open longer than last year (32 hours) which is good to see.

I spent fair bit of time in the bloggers lounge, a small dedicated area with power, a separate wifi connection, and facilities for VMworld TV to broadcast live from. This is where you can often find John Troyer, the godfather of VMware’s social media scene along with many of the twittter names you’ve seen but never met in person. VMworld is a vertitable ‘who’s who’ of the virtualisation world – I found myself sitting next to Scott Lowe for ten minutes before realising who he was and saying hi! Many of the people hanging around the bloggers lounds have been at VMworld many times so it’s a good place to get a feel for what’s hot and what’s not at this year’s conference. I got my first taste of VMworld TV via an invite to vSoupTV. Quite a few people mentioned that it felt quieter this year but as the attendance has been confirmed at over 7,000 it must be because there’s more space rather than less people.

The centre of the complex is used as a relaxation zone complete with plenty of seating, food, recliners (for those quick power naps), table tennis, table ice hockey, chess sets etc. It’s a good place to meet people as you pass through on your way from a general session to the labs. Free wifi is available throughout the Bella Centre but unfortunately it’s pretty temperamental – somewhat expected for a large conference with over 7000 people. That wouldn’t be so bad but the VMworld iPhone app relies on internet access so when that’s not working you can’t reference your schedule or register for sessions. When it does work the VMworld iPhone app is pretty good – you can check for upcoming sessions, get a filtered twitter stream for a given session, and even check site maps. Read more…

As the complexity of virtual infrastructures increases it’s becoming harder to manage using conventional monitoring tools which were built with a more static environment in mind. In March 2011 VMware released the vCenter Operations product (vCOPS) to address this pain point. I’ve been running the 60 day trial at my company and now that the trial’s ending it’s time to share my thoughts.

What is vCOPS?

To quote the product page at VMware;

VMware vCenter Operations uses patented analytics and powerful visualizations to automate performance, capacity and configuration management. It collects and analyzes performance data, correlates abnormalities and identifies the root cause of building performance problems. VMware vCenter Operations provides capacity management to optimize resource usage and policy-based configuration management to assure compliance and eliminate sprawl and configuration drift. (emphasis my own)

The key differentiator is this promise to learn and understand the context of multiple metrics (CPU, memory, storage and network) and provide root cause analysis without you needing to manually define thresholds, benchmarks etc. Bear in mind that vCOPS is an infrastructure monitoring solution rather than application layer (which is more the domain on VMware’s AppSpeed, Quest’s solutions or ManageEngine’s Application Manager). I’m not the first blogger to cover this product so here’s some reading to get you up to speed;

• This great article by Bernd Harzog covers all editions of vCOPS along with some great analysis of it’s strengths and weaknesses.
• Eric Sloof’s blogpost describes how the product works in a bit more detail
• Kendrick Coleman’s post covers his own thoughts with some interesting comments.
• Chris Dearden has written an interesting post on monitoring including where he sees vCOPS fitting in.

While technically a ‘v1′ release the product comes from VMware’s purchase of Integrien (in August 2010) where it was originally marketed as VMAlive. Integrien have been working on the patented algorithms for several years so while the integration and VMware branding are new the guts of the product are not. VMware have published some YouTube videos or you can listen to VM Communities podcast #119 to get an overview of what vCOPS can offer. Read more…