The VCE Coalition, a collaboration of Cisco, EMC, and VMware, offers Vblock Infrastructure Packages, which are one of the fastest-growing and most well known examples of converged infrastructure solutions. The Vblock solution has inspired interest across many organizations and industries and represents a viable alternative for accelerating new data center build-outs and consolidation initiatives that focus on virtualizing computing infrastructure. Their combination of modularity and flexibility also make them an ideal platform for catalyzing the transition to internal and hosted Cloud services.

Watch4net recognized the opportunity to apply the power of the APG solution to the integrated management challenges of the Vblock, and has delivered an extension module supporting these new solutions. The SolutionPack for Vblock took advantage of many existing extensions in the APG portfolio for the comprising components (Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus, Cisco MDS, EMC CLARiiON/Symmetrix/Celerra, and VMware ESX) and then added integrated console dashboards and detailed views to recognize how those components were related to one another with each Vblock instance. Data collection is accomplished via a combination of SNMP and APIs integrated with element managers such as Cisco UCS Manager, VMware vSphere/vCenter, and EMC storage managers.

With this module, customers can optimize the operational monitoring and performance of their Vblock deployments on a module-by-module basis as well as via direct, service level visibility into configurations that support multiple customers or IT user constituencies.

• Auto discovery and recognition of all physical and virtual elements, combined with default monitoring templates which can be easily tuned to specific monitoring policies
• Integrated dashboard consoles showing status and performance of all Vblock constituent elements, with contextual drill-downs for deeper layers of details
• Service-oriented overlay views, including SLA compliance levels, which can be followed directly back to supporting Vblock infrastructure
• Innovative temporal overlay displays combining alerts/events and performance metrics for supporting rapid, visual analysis of complex interdependent performance issues
• More than 300+ out-of-the-box reports and dashboards for revealing performance details across servers, chassis, hypervisors, VMs, network traffic, LUNs, physical disks, and more.