I was on a holiday the last two weeks and slowly catching up on everything that happened. Some of you might think it wasn’t a lot, but in the world of cloud and virtualization it was. Not only was there a huge EUC launch event but also a new version of vCenter Infrastructure Navigator was released. Somehow it has been amazingly quiet around this product. Something I didn’t really understand, especially not after reading the release notes of version 1.1 of vCenter Infrastructure Navigator. Two things stood out:
- vCloud Director support
- Infrastructure Navigator discovers VMware services, such as Site Recovery Manager (SRM) Server, VMware View Server, VMware vCloud Director Server, and VMware vShield Manager Server.
For those who don’t know, Infrastructure Navigator is an application awareness plugin for vCenter Server. This enables you to get a better understanding of what is running on top of your virtual infrastructure. A lot of you may say, well why would I care? Think about DR for a second. What is the most challenging part of creating a DR Plan? Indeed, figuring out all dependencies. That is exactly where vCenter Infrastructure Navigator comes in to play as shown in the screenshot below, which I stole from Ben Scheerer. Ben wrote an excellent blog about some of the cool new features in vCenter Infrastructure Navigator, I am not going to repeat those just read his. It is worth it if you are serious about providing the best service to your (internal) customers!
I think the agent less aspect of it def makes it worth looking at. If I remember correctly, when it first came around.. it required an agent to be installed. Seems like it leverages VMware tools now which is really good IMO..
Bilal – I think it actually uses an API (that is not public) to do this. All other operations that I know of – require credentials to access the Guest OS to perform operations.
And yes this is a really great product!!
To be more precise, VIN uses VIX. Hence the reason port 443 and 902 needs to be open for it to work properly.
I couldn’t understand why there hasn’t been more fuss about this product either! I htink it’s the best part for the vCops suite.
And you only expect expanded functionality across the suite. Think of an application centric view of performance, capacity and optimization! All discovered, group and mapped automatically – again the power of vSphere!
Hi all,
My name is Nir and I’m part of the VMware VIN Escalation Engineering.
I’m pleased to update you that VMware Navigator 2.0 beta is launching!
In this build we designed Navigator to map your environment in a (multi-tier) Application context, so it is easier for you to manage it. You can either add your Application definitions or let Navigator discovers them automatically.
Also, Navigator is now supporting vCOPs monitoring use cases, which leverages your benefit using vCOPs solution. This feature populates vCOPs with the multi-tier Application data Navigator discovers.
Here you can find a short demo we’ve created; in this video you’ll see how simple and smart it is using the Application context discovery.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMwOlb84J58
Please note that the video displays UI mockups and therefore the UI you’ll run might be slight different; anyway, this is our roadmap.
What’s next?
The beta program starts on August 8th; I’m hoping that this time frame enables you adding more Applications to your environment. As you could see in the video, the more varied your environment is, the more value you get from the beta.
Some more technical prerequisites below:
• VC version: 5.0 U1 (latest), or 5.1 RC
• NGC: 5.1 RC
• Other Virtual Machine resources: 2 vCPU, 4GB Memory, 20 GB Disk space and 1Gbps Networking
During the beta program we will appreciate your co-operation in sending us logs and feedback.
If you are interested in applying this program, could you please send me an email and share some information on your beta environment? How many hosts and VMs, what Applications are running and whether you are also running a vCOPs 5.6 beta build (preferred).
I hope to see you on board,
Nir