Veeam Embraces Microsoft System Operations Manager

Study Finds Network Admins Juggling Multiple Initiatives

Following the rise of virtualization, there are within most enterprise IT organizations now two dominant management consoles. One is VMware vSphere and the other is Microsoft System Operations Manager.

Starting today, Veeam Software, a provider of agentless backup and replication software, supports them both. Doug Hazelman, vice president of product strategy for Veeam, says that while Veeam has supported both Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware virtual machines for a while, Veeam Management Pack (MP) version 7 for Microsoft System Center marks the first time Veeam MP has been able to plug directly into the Microsoft management console.

Integration with Microsoft System Operations Manager will enable Hyper-V administrators to access information in real time about how much memory is being consumed by each virtual machine on a host, along with analytics tools to determine how much backup space is going to be required on premise and in the cloud.

Veeam is specifically optimized for virtual machine environments where managing the backup process across large numbers of virtual machines that consume a lot of memory has become especially complex. As Microsoft Hyper-V has gained in usage, the same management challenges that have affected VMware are now routinely being encountered by sites that have adopted Microsoft Hyper-V.

To drive adoption of Veeam into the sites, the company also announced today that through the end of the year it will allow customers to deploy up to 100 full-production licenses of Veeam MP for Hyper-V Enterprise edition, plus one year of maintenance, for free.

It is unclear how many organizations are running both VMware and Hyper-V, but even when they do employ both virtual machines, Hazelman says the two environments tend to be managed in isolation from one another. That, of course, may not be the case forever. But in the meantime, IT organizations can take some comfort in the fact that at least there’s a common approach to backing them both up.