Dell Software announced the next generation of its virtualization operations management suite.

The suite is comprised of a trio of solutions that help businesses of all sizes streamline virtualization, storage and cloud computing initiatives. The new releases include Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise and Standard Editions 7.0 and Foglight for Storage Management 3.0.

These releases address a number of data center transformation challenges – from optimizing performance and efficiency in your virtual environment to solving end-to-end storage and virtualization challenges in complex and cloud based systems.

Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition 7.0 provides end-to-end performance monitoring and operations management for heterogeneous virtual environments to help reduce operational costs, speed deployments and simplify the complexity of the data center virtual and physical infrastructure.

This solution also includes integration with storage, Microsoft Active Directory, and Microsoft Exchange modules to provide performance analysis and advice across data center infrastructure.

New optimization functionality allows I&O administrators to significantly increase consolidation ratios with improved visibility and analytics geared toward right-sizing CPU, memory, and storage, and effectively manages virtual machine (VM) sprawl by reclaiming resources through new optimization insight into such waste as powered off VMs, Zombie VMs, abandoned images, and unused templates and snapshots.

Additional enhancements include:

- VMware vCloud Director support for monitoring and optimizing private cloud implementation

- VMware View support for end-to-end visibility into performance of the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), including users and sessions

- vSphere 5.5 support including all generally available VMware platforms

Foglight for Storage Management 3.0 helps to ensure the right storage configuration to optimize virtual infrastructure performance and availability. It provides virtualization managers with complete visibility into the underlying physical storage infrastructure that lies beneath the virtual datastores, enabling them to immediately identify hosts, VMs, and datastores experiencing performance problems caused by underlying physical host, fabric and storage components and tips to fix the issues.

Foglight for Storage Management gathers extensive performance metrics and presents this data within a rich graphical interface incorporating architectural diagrams, graphs, alerts, and drill-down screens for fast and easy identification of virtual and physical storage problems.

New feature functionality provides:

- Pool level analysis to track remaining capacity and over-commitment for thin provisioning

- Performance analyzer to provide one-click performance troubleshooting visibility from VM to array to sub-array level in a single dashboard

- Additional device support for Dell Compellent, Dell EqualLogic, and EMC VMAX

Foglight for Virtualization, Standard Edition 7.0 is specifically designed for the small –to-medium size environment, with a focus on ease of use and quick time to value. It provides administrators insight into virtual environment performance and automated resource optimization, capacity planning, chargeback and showback, and change analysis and compliance.

New capacity management and planning functionality helps to drive data center sustainability and reduce power consumption to decrease operating costs and capital expenditures, while improving workload performance. It does this by analyzing existing VM workload requirements against the entire environment and identifying the minimum number of host servers required over time to safely support workloads.

Additional new enhancements include:

- Enhanced User Interface for a more intuitive approach to capacity management and planning

- New Capacity Planning Features to prepare for host server refresh, upgrade, or expansion projects by finding the optimum configurations and minimum number of new or existing host servers to maximize VM performance while minimizing server cost, space, and power needs

- New Power Minimization Feature to reduce costs by determining the minimum number of host servers needed over time to safely run workloads, and estimating potential cost savings by powering down unneeded servers

- New Optimization to automatically adjust virtual machine disk sizes up or down, based on actual use

All three solutions are expected to be generally available on August 31.