Veeam released a new version of it’s plugin for Operations Manager monitoring products from HP or Microsoft. The plugin is a significant add-on to the monitoring products in order to keep in touch with what happens in your virtual environment within a single monitoring solution.

What’s new in version 5:

• nworks management center
  a new component that allows centralized configuration, load balancing and high availability for multiple nworks collectors
• Full (native) support for VMware vSphere 4
• a business approach (reports) for the new vSphere features like DPM, Host profiles and Fault Tolerance

Veeam released a short video at http://www.veeam.com/go/nworks5/ and offers a free trial for it’s new management pack.

When would this be interesting for your organization?

• You have or plan to have a virtual environment
• You are a current user of MOM/SCOM or HP Operations Manager
• It completely integrates with the existing monitoring solution so no new or extra monitoring solutions which require additional training etc.. Especially in large organizations with critical 24/7 business applications the response to failures in the underlying infrastructure is a critical issue regarding service levels that have to be met. These organizations depend heavily on their monitoring solutions, not having to introduce new monitoring helps in reducing complexity for maintenance etc.
• Even smaller companies can profit from the plugin if they use the Service Center Essentials package from Microsoft, if not other products are in scope like Veeam Monitor (or the special SMB-package), but vFoglight from Quest/Vizioncore and vWire from Tripwire are serious candidates as well.

These are what I believe the most important reasons to choose for the nworks, there are more but they are at feature level which changes per month. Most vendors in the monitoring market now (or in the very near future) support VMware vSphere and all are adding features (e.g. business/service level approaches/views) that enhance the tool. Unless you are specifically looking for one of these features you are not bound by a supplier from feature perspective. I’ve seen serious differences in performance between the different vendors so please first download a trial and do a proof of concept in your environment before buying. Most of the vendor’s have trials available and if one doesn’t have: request it!