Veeam adds capacity planning to Reporter tool

Veeam Reporter 4.0 gives IT oversight for VMware infrastructure

Veeam has introduced an updated version of its Reporter tool for the discovery and documentation of VMware infrastructure, adding capacity planning features and improved change management reporting.

Available immediately, Veeam Reporter 4.0 updates Veeam Reporter Enterprise. It provides comprehensive visual analysis of an organisation's VMware infrastructure plus support for planning future capacity, according to the firm.

The latter capability is provided by a capacity planning report pack that projects future resource requirements based on historical growth and past performance, allowing managers to stay ahead of growth in demand.

"The technical change was to gather performance metrics. Previously, we just got the allocation information [from VMware], but we can now look at allocation versus utilisation, and look at when a customer might want to add additional resources," said Doug Hazelman, director of Veeam's Global Systems Engineering group.

For example, a customer may have a policy that its infrastructure should run at no higher than 80 per cent utilisation, and Veeam Reporter 4.0 will let them see when this point might be reached, Hazelman explained.

Other new features include a customisable dashboard within the web-based user interface which can display charts and graphs of key metrics. This can also link with SharePoint so that users can see the information at-a-glance from their SharePoint portal.

Version 4.0 also adds the ability to generate reports from the server instead of the client, via a new reporting engine based on Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services.

This provides the ability to schedule report generation, and have them automatically emailed to key staff.

Meanwhile, change management reports have been improved to include audit information for changed objects, enabling administrators to quickly pinpoint what has gone wrong if a virtual machine goes down.

"We can now detect a change and tie it back to the audit event, so a manager can see what was changed and who did it," said Hazelman.

Veeam Reporter 4.0 can also integrate information from Veeam's Business View tool, which gives an overview of VMware infrastructure from a business viewpoint, such as breaking down resources by department.

Licensing for Veeam Reporter 4.0 remains unchanged at £275 per processor socket for each VMware host server managed.