comments around Business View

[ashleyw]

Hi,

After a rough start, we got v2 of business view up and running fine.
We have been able to do some simple high level project categorisations on our farm of around 400 VMs and give access to the Business View web interface to our teams.
This simple start has directly led to managing the number of VMs in our farm down to around 300! The simple threat of charge-back accounting seemed to have helped
This really does show how a simple tool like Business view can lead to some very quick wins - great stuff!

A couple of suggestions/questions;
- Our users said it would be great if they have the ability to enter say a description for each VM themselves. This could store the data into a custom vCentre VM level attribute (which could be configurable) but could be visible on the workspace view/report viewpoint.
- From brainstorming on this side, I think what we are after is an enhancement of the whole Business view product that would enable better lifecycle management of VMs (tiering/archiving/deletion etc).

Is there a Veeam vision on where Business View is going or will it stay a lightweight simple tool for very basic categorisation?

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Ashley,

Good to hear that you're up and running! Now let's take a look at your questions...

- Our users said it would be great if they have the ability to enter say a description for each VM themselves. This could store the data into a custom vCentre VM level attribute (which could be configurable) but could be visible on the workspace view/report viewpoint.

Thanks for the feedback. Could you please clarify how would you use this data?

- From brainstorming on this side, I think what we are after is an enhancement of the whole Business view product that would enable better lifecycle management of VMs (tiering/archiving/deletion etc).

Would you like to keep categorization history for your VMs? Did I get it right?

Is there a Veeam vision on where Business View is going or will it stay a lightweight simple tool for very basic categorisation?

Actually we've merged Business View into Veeam ONE solution and starting from the next version it will be shipped as a part of Veeam ONE.

The initial purpose of Veeam Business View was to give you an ability to monitor/report/manage your VMs and other VI objects according to their business purpose, department, and role in your VI. Another way of using BV might be a basic chargeback/showback, as you can export all the data to Excel and use it in your further analysis.

Our of curiosity, how do you use Business View today? What is the main purpose of your categorization? Do you use these groups as a monitoring/reporting container?

[ashleyw]

thanks Vitaliy,

In terms of columns like a "description" we would like the users to be able to enter their own metadata on each VM without having to have access to vCentre. In our situations we may have a single client (we are a development shop) that is worked on by multiple teams - eg. Sharepoint team, database team etc etc. I'm looking for an easy way for whoever is responsible for the VM to be able to add whatever data they need to help with either additional categorisation or reporting.

On lifecycle management, we are not 100% sure ourselves of exactly what features we would want - it was mainly a comment that we'd like to be able to manage the life of a development VM which would mean we'd need to capture and report on additional metadata such as "date Added To Farm", "Owner", "Profit&Loss Code","Project Code","Project Phase" etc etc. We'll need to give more thought on this.

In terms of management, we manage at a farm level rather than a project level, as obviously in a fully virtualised infrastructure, there are so many shared components, that managing at a more granular level becomes problematic (at-least in terms of performance).

So far the only real use we've found of Business view from our side is to give the entire project teams visibility - ie. showback with the threat of a fairer way of chargeback for virtualised development resources to internal teams. This helps us to manage sprawl.

The ability to generate monitoring/reporting on a specific containers is nice to be able to give some secondary detail to anyone requesting it, but we wouldn't typically use it beyond this.

but again, like the rest of the Veeam products, we like their elegance and simplicity - and it's this that gives them their real power.

[Vitaliy S.]

Ashley, thanks so much for your input, it was really useful to hear how our product is actually used in the real world!