Other VMware products complementary to vSphere

VMware has a plethora of other products for different segments and some of them could be interesting to adopt in a vSphere environment, for example:

• vRealize Operations: This is a monitoring tool used to improve application performance, prevent business disruptions, and make IT more efficient. There is also a specific SKU of vSphere Essentials Plus that includes the operations component. We will describe some of its features in Chapter 9, Monitoring, Optimizing, and Troubleshooting.
• vRealize Log Insight: This is useful to collect logs from different sources (not necessarily only ESXi hosts) and analyze that data. VMware users with a supported vCenter Server license (version 5.x or 6.x) are entitled to a 25-OSI pack of vRealize Log Insight for vCenter Server (see http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2144909). We will describe some of its features in Chapter 9, Monitoring, Optimizing, and Troubleshooting.
• Site Recovery Manager: This product is an orchestrator to simplify the site disaster recovery plan in a single-click procedure, with the capability to test it in safe mode and to handle not only the fail-over procedures (planned or unplanned) but also fail-backs. This product is designed to manage only disaster recovery (DR) for vSphere environments. We will describe some of its features in Chapter 12, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery.
• VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO): This is a VMware supported OpenStack distribution that makes it easier for IT to run a production-grade OpenStack-based deployment on top of their existing VMware vSphere infrastructure.