Microsoft VMM Analytics takes pulse of on-site virtual machine
Virtual machines (VMs) are one of the popular technologies among data centers today. Due to their widespread use, keeping tabs on VMs can be an arduous undertaking. To make VM tracking easier, Microsoft recently unveiled a new open source project dubbed “VMM Analytics.”
VMM Analytics is available in Azure Log Analytics as a feature of Microsoft’s Operations Management Suite (OMS). In August, Microsoft publicly previewed a new service called Device Health, which monitors Windows 10 client devices for crashes and driver problems. The OMS Network Performance Monitor addition is intended to monitor the status of network connections for both cloud-based and premise-based applications.
OMS is Microsoft’s management solution for managing hybrid cloud workloads for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and company datacenters. There are two types of subscriptions options for OMS: Operations Management Suite E1 and Operations Management Suite E2. Software Assurance users can add either service onto their existing System Center environment. According to the company, the solution is compatible with System Center products, providing “modern IT management scenarios, delivering simplified ways to solve and prevent problems.”
Although the open source project allows contributors to make modifications to the code, reports for certain data visualizations are built into the solution. The company said integrating VMM Analytics with OMS will open the window for a range of “compelling use cases” for some companies. For instance, the solution provides data for on-premise VM instances, enabling a bird’s eye view of VM activity. Users can also choose to use VMM Analytics to send out notifications to OMS users on whether a VMM job was completed or failed. Moreover, VMM administrators can use the platform to design data visualizations and queries when searching for pertinent data.
The news follows Microsoft announcing another new feature for its Azure cloud platform called Confidential Computing this month to minimize data breaches. It can run on two modes, including one on virtual machines and another on the software guard extensions (SGX). The former uses Virtual Secure Mode (VSM) functionality of Hyper-V. The Hyper-V separates the virtual machines, so if one is infected, it may not spread to the rest.
