Today, VMware announced the new and much improved VMware vCenter Operations Management 5.8.

The new features of 5.8 are poised to make this version of vCOps much more useful to hybrid environments that use both ESXi and Hyper-V, or hybrid cloud environments that utilize vCloud Director and Amazon Web Services.

Extensibilty

VMware has taken the approach that vCOps needs to be able to change quickly so that multiple types of platforms can be monitored from a the application.  Being able to quickly handle different types of environments will likely increase the adoption of a VMware application, but it’s good for everyone.

VMware has a marketplace for “Management Packs” which allows different plugins to be added to several of their platforms including vCOps.  Please see the https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/category_groups/cloud-management for more information about the packs, and vendors associated.

Application Monitoring

A management pack for Microsoft Exchange as well as Microsoft SQL server will be available.  Now, not only can vCOps monitor the virtual machines, but the running applications as well.  How many times have your VMs been running fine, but something broke your Exchange Database Availability Group (DAG) or your SQL cluster?  With vCOps 5.8 you’ll be able to drill down into your VM to the application level to find out where a problem exists.

Hyper-V integration

If you’ve run a Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere shop, you’ve possibly had to use several management tools to view the health of your environment.  vCOps 5.8 is taking a step towards aggregating the system information of those two technologies so that they can be viewed in a single application.  Much like with a vSphere environment, the relationship between Hyper-V hosts –> Hyper-V VMs –> Guest OS will be shown in the vCOps interface.

You’ll be able to download a management pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) or the Hyperic Management Pack.  Hyperic will require an agent to be installed. In either case, the dashboards shown in vCOps will look identical.

Amazon Web Services

Not all virtual machines live inside your private cloud environment.  Some of them are housed in a public cloud such as Amazon Web Services.  vCOps 5.8 will be able to monitor your public cloud as well with the AWS Management Pack.

The AWS pack will allow you to view your EC2 instances, Elastic Block Store (EBS) Volumes, Elastic Map Reduce (EMR), Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and Auto Scaling Group (ASG) to name a few.  This data is all pulled from AWS Cloudwatch which uses the REST API

Licensing

If you want to know the versions available and what you’ll need, the chart is below, but always refer to the official VMware documentation in case things change.