Veeam Business View version 2.0 has been released and has got quite a few new features.
Few days ago Veeam has announced a new version of Veeam Business View 2.0 which is part of Veeam One offer. You can have a look at the Vhat's new page at Veeam here. If you're not familiar with Business View, let me introduce you the product. I already blogged about the first release of Veeam Business View here on my website.
If you're already know what Veeam Business View is you go and download the Free product here. A free registration is required.
Veeam Business View 2.0 is part of Veeam One offer.
What's new in Veeam Business View 2.0:
Categorization of clusters, hosts and datastores – You have the possibility now to categorize all the major objects in your virtual infrastructure to build a comprehensive model that reflects the particular characteristics of your organization.
Dynamic groups – No need to manually categorize. You just needs to define the criteria for categorizing the objects in your VMware vSphere environment and Business View does the rest of the job….
It discovers and monitors the attributes of the objects and creates the groups into which those objects are assigned.
A quick quote from Veeam's Website:
For example, you can define a categorization expression that groups VMs based on vCPU usage, and Business View will dynamically create and name groups according to the specified naming strategy. In this example, you could specify that group names be generated by concatenating actual vCPU count with the text string “vCPU.” Business View will then discover and assign VMs to groups with names like 1vCPU, 2vCPU, 4vCPU and so on. Should your infrastructure change such that any of the dynamic groups becomes empty, Business View will automatically remove the group.
Hosts and datastores can be categorized in a similar manner. For example, you can automatically group datastores based on amount of free space. Your categorization expression could direct Business View to make group assignments such that datastores
with free space within 10% of capacity are placed in “Overutilized,” those with free space between 10% and 30% are placed in “Normal,” and those with free space greater than 30% are placed in “Underutilized.”Best of all, maintaining your groups requires no manual user intervention because Business View keeps your groups up-to-date on an ongoing basis. As objects are added, moved and deleted, groups are created, updated and pruned. With Business View dynamic groups, you are assured of an accurate view of your ever-changing virtual environment.
Enhanced dashboard and object views – there is a new summary dashboard with a categorization for all the objects present in your Virtual Infrastructure. You can choose to display all the dashboard Views at once or select only some of the views. You can see what's been categorized already and what's not.
Other Enhancements:
New rule capabilities – With rules based on object names an infrastructure location, you are also able to specify conditions for object properties like CPU clock rate, memory size or power state.
Exclusions – You're able to exclude objects when a rule is set. You can use this feature for example when you testing changes which you do not want to be reflected in views of your production environement.
Custom attribute mappings and synchronization – You're able to share the categorization information with third party applications like Microsoft Active Directory. Business view provides script-based synchronization.
Business View 2.0 is a free product and is available from the Veeam website, registration required. Read the entire What's new document on Business View 2.0!
Rick Vanover from Veeam also blogged on Veeam's blog about the new release or Veeam Business View 2.0. Here is a quick quote from his blog concerning one of those features….
Offline synchronization of attributes: This is an important new feature which allows mapping of attributes from external systems and content management databases (CMDBs). The best use case is to interface with Active Directory. With this feature, Business View categorizations will then be synchronized with Active Directory. This is done by an export of computer accounts in Active Directory via a script coupled with a CSV file of the custom attributes. These are run and imported each time the vCenter collection is run to keep all attributes in sync continually. This is done from the Import/Export section of the configuration pane, shown below:
Source: Veeam
