Local Cbus company gets national press - Veeam Reporter 4.0 Gives the Scoop on VMware vSphere Deployments - Virtualization from eWeek

Veeam Reporter 4.0 Gives the Scoop on VMware vSphere Deployments - Virtualization from eWeek

Version 4.0 of Veeam Reporter supercharges the VMware vSphere information-gathering process, swiftly and intuitively providing valuable insight into complex infrastructures.

The rapid growth of virtualization has created complex IT environments that are becoming increasingly harder to manage. Part of that management challenge comes from hastily deployed products, which often lack the proper deployment documentation needed to monitor the virtual infrastructure in place.

Veeam Software aims to bring order to that documentation and management chaos, at least for VMware vSphere-powered infrastructures. Veeam Reporter 4.0 focuses on three categories of information: reporting, change management and capacity planning.

All in all, I found Veeam Reporter 4.0 easy to install and use. The product deserves high marks for its graphical reporting capabilities and the ease with which reports can be generated. There are several wizards that help with installation, setup and reporting that newbie users will appreciate. However, I would prefer a little more automation when it comes to collecting data, and perhaps a real-time method of gathering data from VMware's vCenter and the various objects on the network. The product is priced at an affordable $375 per server socket and is currently available from Veeam Software and its authorized resellers.

Veeam Reporter 4.0's capabilities make it useful for understanding complex virtual environments. First and foremost is the reporting capability, which is now based upon Microsoft SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services). I was pleasantly surprised at the breadth and depth of reports offered; perhaps "reports" is not the correct word to use here, as the software blends monitoring with static reporting to create a visual, interactive representation of the infrastructure. Regardless, the reports or screens offered a vast array of details specific to virtualized environments and supported filtering, drill-down and customization options.

I found the best place to start with an evaluation was the dashboard, which was intuitive and could be customized, a powerful feature. It was also very easy to set up. I simply had to drag and drop report icons onto the dashboard to activate the reports. A multitude of options are available; I selected CPU usage, host performance and storage utilization. Having those reports on the dashboard gave me a quick picture of the load placed on the virtual infrastructure and its general health, and gave me a good starting point from which to track down performance and utilization problems. What's more, I was able to judge at a glance how well the infrastructure was meeting user demands throughout the day.

Of course, helping to make an IT administrator's day a little easier is only part of Veeam Reporter 4.0's functions. The other part of management puzzle involves business needs and policies, and Veeam Reporter 4.0 also tackles the needs of bean counters and department managers. For example, I was able to create reports for storage utilization by department, storage utilization by cluster and memory usage by departmental virtual machine. Each of those reports would have value when it came to IT budgeting for departmental charges, SLAs (service-level agreements) or business unit resource utilization. That is only a small sample of the reports of this type available.

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