Closing the Loop on VM Life Cycle Management with Foglight vOPS Standard 6.5

We are pleased to announce today the release of the new Dell Foglight vOPS Standard 6.5 (formerly referred to as vOPS Server Standard). This new release introduces capabilities that close the loop on the VM life cycle, and add support to help manage each phase of a VM's creation, production life and eventual retirement.

The main business driver for many virtualization projects is capital cost reduction. Savings are gained from the enhanced resource efficiency that virtualization provides, decreasing the need for expensive hardware. To gain maximum resource efficiency, virtualized data centers must:

• Holistically plan for capacity - Environment growth planning must begin when budgeting for hardware purchases and then continue to determine where the VM will be optimally placed within installed hardware.
• During production life, VMs must be continuously reviewed and adjusted for sizing to ensure that an environment can maintain maximum efficiency. 
• When a VM outlives its useful life, it should then be removed as quickly as possible to make room for new VMs. 

The management of the creation, production and then retirement phases of a VM corresponds to VM life cycle management. If any phase in the life cycle is not correctly managed, an environment will suffer inefficiencies that will impact a virtualization project’s financial return.

Foglight vOPS Standard has historically provided functionality to plan for VMs in already purchased hardware, and to manage VMs that were live. The new release of Foglight vOPS Standard 6.5 will help virtual admins close the loop for management over the VM life cycle, allowing for effective management of the retirement of unnecessary VMs, and ability to gain a holistic capacity planning approach that includes planning for hardware purchasing. Specifically, Foglight vOPS Standard 6.5 makes available:

• Hardware modeling– System administrators can simulate hardware refreshes, adding hosts to clusters, or adding entire clusters to a virtual environment. The modeled hardware capacity can then be further modeled out to account for VM movement, additions or decommissions.
• Automated VM Decomissioning– VMs can now be scheduled to be automatically decommissioned. This complements existing optimization functionality that recognizes related files for unused VMs and automates their removed to open up capacity for new VMs.

The new release also adds:

• New Host and Datastore Diagnosis Screen– This release extends the user interface for a single diagnosis page for all of an object’s issues to hosts and datastores. 
• Customizable Tab Layout– Users will now be able to customize their sessions by enabling or disabling which tabs they’d like to view. 

Try out these new capabilities in your environment, and close the loop on your VMs' life cycles. After a quick download, the system takes 20 minutes to install and will begin to find issues in the environment immediately.