Today at VMWorld Europe 2009 in Cannes VMware introduced their strategy for the coming years.  VMware combines Chargeback, CapacityIQ, Orchestrator, ConfigControl and self service in the vCenter Management Suite. These are the building blocks that create the foundation for the next level in the virtualization game.

vCenter Chargeback as part of the management vServices. vCenter Chargeback enables automated tracking of costs and chargeback to the business enabling IT to function as a utility with true visibility into operating costs.

It is fully integrated with VMware vCenter Serverand delivers the ability for administrators to understand costing and drive accountability across business units.  Base cost models, fixed costs, and additional factors can be entered into VMware vCenter Chargeback for proper business alignment in addition to allowing for costs to be propagated across an environment correctly.

 

VMware vCenter Chargeback takes into account many different factors. These range for hardware costs (CPU, Memory, Storage, etc.) to additional elements such as power and cooling. VMware vCenter Chargeback can incorporate all of these variables to provide IT with a comprehensive virtualized environment cost enabling charge back to individual business units and the business as a whole.

  • Understand the costs of virtual machines
  • Properly allocate costs across organization units
  • Comprehensive reporting

Virtualization introduces a shared, dynamic environment that enables better, more effective capacity utilization. This constantly changing environment provides the business agility you need, and requires fine grained visibility and planning.

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ ensures optimal alignment of business demand and IT resource supply making your capacity both efficient and predictable.

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ continuously profiles, analyzes and tracks your capacity needs at multiple levels: virtual machine, host, cluster and datacenter. Based on historical capacity consumption patterns, VMware vCenter CapacityIQ trends and forecasts your current and future capacity needs, ensuring that capacity is always available and service levels are met.

vCenter Orchestrator enables the development of customized workflows that automate operational tasks through a simple drag and drop interface, without the need for scripting. It contains a GUI based workflow tool that interacts with the VMware API, CLI and VC UI, SSH, WMI, SMTP, SNMP, Databases and 3rd part systems. A library of prebuilt workflows (400) will be included.

The automation for VMware is a important step towards Cloud computing, vCloud and VDC-OS.

Some of the tasks it can perform are:
Provisioning
– automate builds of ESX and VMs
– Provisioning storage and network related devices relating to virtual infrastructure

Managing applications and operating systems
– automating appl installation and basic configuration

Maintenance and a bit of DR
– creating or moving VMs during maintenance
– pre-provisioning of VMs

Backup and decommissioning
– managing archives, backups, and snapshots of VMs

Here you can view a vCenter Orchestrator demo.