Introducing VM Manager: Easily Run Large Compute Engine Teams

Businesses are accelerating their digital transformation — moving more and more workloads to the cloud. However, the cloud can often be complex with unfamiliar tools to manage and operate a large fleet of virtual machines (VMs). In particular, managing infrastructure security and compliance visibility at cloud scale can be challenging for infrastructure and operations administrators. Customers tell Google they need simplified cloud-native tools to operate and manage their cloud resources, similar to their familiar infrastructure management tools.

Google is excited to announce VM Manager, a suite of infrastructure management tools to simplify and automate maintenance of virtual machine fleets Compute Engine big. This cloud-native solution with Google's scaled infrastructure in mind, provides a simplified toolset for automated compliance reporting and software deployment at scale.

VM Manager's automated features help simplify and reduce the complexity of ensuring compliance, visibility, and maintaining the security of large VM fleets. It features a single dashboard to increase compliance visibility and track real-time inventory data to drive actionable insights and maintain peak infrastructure performance. The toolkit supports the most popular Windows and Linux operating system environments and includes the following services:

• Patch management: This service keeps your system up to date with security vulnerabilities by allowing you to apply operating system patches across a set of virtual machines, receiving patch compliance data across the operating system environment your operating system and automatically install operating system patches on virtual machines—all from one management tool.
• Patch management service: has two main components – the patch compliance report, which provides insight into the patch status of virtual machines across Windows and Linux distributions; and patch deployment, automating the operating system and software patch update process. Patch deployment schedules patch jobs.
• Configuration management: This service allows you to deploy, query, and maintain consistent configuration for your virtual machines. It comes with automated remediation features to reduce manual work and ensure compliance. Guest policies per Compute Engine virtual machine keep your software configuration consistent.

“With infrastructure supporting hundreds of millions of players globally, maintaining consistent configuration for virtual machine instances is critical. Configuration management has reduced manual work, with features that enable King to manage Google Cloud resources at scale.” – Martin Danko, Senior DevOps Engineer, King.com”

• Inventory management: allows you to collect information about operating systems and packages. You can determine which virtual machines are running a specific version of the operating system, view the packages installed on the virtual machines, create a list of available update packages for each virtual machine, and identify packages and updates. Update or patch is missing for the virtual machine. Inventory management is integrated with another Google Cloud product, Cloud Asset Inventory to simplify viewing, monitoring, and analyzing your Google Cloud fleet data.

In addition to the above, VM Manager has a strong roadmap of exciting features coming in the coming months, so stay tuned.

Easily manage the largest servers

VM Manager reduces complexity, improves security and compliance reporting, and simplifies resource monitoring in large cloud environments. By leveraging automated tools to keep systems up to date, reduce the risk of downtime, and improve internal user productivity, early adopters of VM Manager told Google that it enabled Their IT administrators focus on other important business tasks.

“We are excited to launch VM Manager on Google Cloud. Managing cloud infrastructure is a challenge for businesses of all sizes, and Google has boosted efficiency with its automated features. Patch and Configuration Manager both for ourselves internally and for our customers. Atos is excited to bring additional value to customers with Google Cloud's cloud-native solution for managing large virtual machine fleets. ” – Ovidiu Julean, Tower Architect, Atos

To learn more about VM Manager, visit document or watch the Google Cloud Next '20: OnAir conference, tool for managing large virtual machine fleets by Google.

Source: Gimasys