Veeam Management Pack (MP) for System Center has always been a great way for enterprises to clearly connect mission-critical applications to the vital systems they run on down to the virtualization and hardware levels. This app-to-metal visibility is truly a requirement in enterprises today, and for organizations who have implemented Microsoft System Center, you have a great opportunity with the Veeam MP. Today, the Veeam MP v8 Update 5 is now Available!

What’s new in Veeam MP?

There are many new things in Veeam MP v8 Update 5. This builds off of Update 4 last year. Here is a quick rundown of what’s new in this update, followed by a longer explanation in subsequent sections:

Built-in monitoring for Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows

Morning Coffee Dashboard for at-a-glance, real-time health status of your Veeam backup environments

Monitoring for VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Additional VMware vSAN & vCenter Alarms

The key takeaway here is that critical new platforms can be monitored now with the Veeam MP.

Built-in monitoring for Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows

Last year, when Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows was updated to version 2.1, it had integration with Veeam Backup & Replication for management of the deployment of the Windows Agent as well as job configuration. With Veeam MP v8 Update 5, this capability is extended into System Center and allows real-time alerts of your Veeam backup jobs and policies for systems where the System Center Agent is installed. In addition to monitoring the Veeam backup status of these agents (usually physical servers), having the System Center Agent on these systems will combine system-wide event and performance data. Couple this with applications that System Center is aware of (like Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint and many more), and there is a visibility benefit that combines the run-state of a system, enterprise applications and the Availability strategy with Veeam backup products. This is in addition to the ability to manage VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V virtualized infrastructures, and their backups, in Veeam MP.

At-a-glance, real-time health status of your Veeam backup environments

One of the most popular capabilities of Veeam MP are the Morning Coffee Dashboards for VMware and Hyper-V environments. In Veeam MP v8 Update 5, we added a Morning Coffee Dashboard for Veeam Backup & Replication, to give an at-a-glance, real-time health status of the backup infrastructure components. This is very important for larger Veeam Backup & Replication installations, as there may be many Veeam Backup Servers, sites, backup jobs, proxies, different types of repositories, use of Scale-out Backup Repositories and now the Veeam Agents. This new dashboard in the Operations Manager console complements the existing Veeam Morning Coffee Dashboards already available in Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS) which can extend Veeam MP visibility beyond the on-premises consoles to the cloud-based Microsoft OMS view. This dashboard can also be scoped for each data center’s backup infrastructure, which may be a more relevant view due to different characteristics in each. The figure below is a sample Morning Coffee Dashboard for Veeam Backup & Replication, which shows how easy it is to read:

Monitoring for VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS)

One of the new technologies that VMware has brought to market is the VMware Cloud on AWS. This new offering allows organizations to have a full vSphere environment running in AWS. The best part is that organizations have the complete control they are accustomed to on-premises with a VMware vSphere infrastructure, yet very close to other Amazon Web Services offering. Since Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 3, which came out last month, organizations have been able to back up workloads running in VMware Cloud on AWS. Now, with Veeam MP v8 Update 5, organizations can have a consistent view of the clusters running on-premises with the infrastructure running in VMware Cloud on AWS. Coupled with the backup capability, the management opportunity here is a complete solution for organizations wanting to run workloads on VMware Cloud on AWS.

VMware vSAN & vCenter Alarms

Another new VMware technology that Veeam MP can provide monitoring for is VMware vSAN. VMware vSAN is a great storage technology (on a personal note, we’re using it in our lab and I’m falling in love with it). With this new storage technology, there are many new alarms that enterprises will need to be aware of to keep vSAN running as expected, including automated vSAN health, configuration, and hardware compatibility checks. And additional to the new vSAN alarms, there are new Veeam MP monitors tracking critical vCenter services, such as the Update Manager service and the PSC (Platform Services Controller).

Like all other capabilities in the Veeam MP, these new alarm monitors come with KB articles so that Veeam MP operators can quickly get easy-to-read information, even if they are not an expert in VMware vSphere or vSAN. This can help organizations solve issues correctly and quickly by having the right information at the right time.

By the way, if you didn’t know, Veeam Backup & Replication supports backup from vSAN with leading awareness for data locality, and we have done this for almost 4 years now. This is in addition to full support for VMware’s Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM). Combining the best, most aware backup with the best management capabilities is the perfect recipe for the best vSAN experience.

Veeam MP v8 U5: More of what you need for visibility and management

For organizations using System Center, this is a critical set of new capabilities and there is no better time than now to plan an upgrade to Veeam MP v8 Update 5. Having this level of visibility, app-to-metal, is what organizations need to meet their SLAs and the needs of their stakeholders. See more details in the KB of what’s new.

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