Men&Mice at VMworld 2018, Las Vegas Part 1: DATA CENTER AND CLOUD

We’re returning to VMworld in Las Vegas, August 26-30 (Booth #2124, come say hi!) — and excited to not only see how our industry is evolving to virtualization and automation, but to also contribute our two cents to the dialog (Or 9.1 cents, as it were).

Since the newly released Men&Mice Suite v9.1 offers highly scalable and efficient APIs that act as an abstraction layer to manage an organization’s whole DNS, DHCP and IP address infrastructure, across multiple vendors and cloud platforms, we’re focusing on two main tracks from the VMWorld agenda: Data Center and Cloud and Networking and Security, the first of which we’ll discuss in this post (the latter will appear in the next post).

DATA CENTER AND CLOUD

VMworld’s focus on integrated IT strategy plays nicely with the Men&Mice Suite v9.1 release (and our larger objectives as well).

Men&Mice has been providing compatibility with VMware’s vRealize Orchestrator and vRealize Automation for years now. As the industry turns toward virtualization and cloud technology to build its next-generation, hyper-converged infrastructure in hybrid cloud environments, running cloud-native applications to cut costs and increase efficiency, so to have we adapted our Men&Mice Suite of DNS, DHCP and IPAM solutions to help organizations manage networks effectively and at scale.

The Men&Mice Suite v9.1 supports Unix/Linux, Windows, and Cisco IOS and stretches into the cloud with functionality across Azure DNS, Amazon Route 53, Dyn, NS1 and Akamai Fast DNS, as well as IPAM in AWS, Azure and OpenStack.  It can be dropped on top of an organization’s existing infrastructure to manage, sync and automate network changes, authorizations and provide comprehensive insight into large-scale networks through one unified dashboard.

The Men&Mice Suite v9.1 supports thousands of concurrent users and API connections, with millions of managed IPs and DNS records, for automation and provisioning.

Virtualized Infrastructure and Applications

We favor virtualization over physical appliances and platform-specific, custom hardware allocation. Turns out, our customers do too.  We want our customers to be able to make the right choices for their network infrastructure (DDI) needs. Then, we offer our environment- and platform-agnostic Men&Mice Suite to help them manage it.

Virtualized infrastructure is both cost and performance efficient. Men&Mice Suite gives organizations the flexibility and adaptability they need as every area of business operations goes digital, providing the managaibility and visibility needed for high-availability networks to be, well, highly available.

Our new Men&Mice Suite v9.1, an overlay network management solution, offers many advantages for virtualizing and automating, as well as increasing visibility and ease-of-management of an enterprise organization’s network infrastructure, including its new web-based management application, which takes the “daunt” out of day-to-day operations and reporting.

Another way we’re making virtualization easier is through the Men&Mice virtual appliances, the DNS software for which we’ve upgraded to BIND 9.11, supporting various new features as well as DNSTAP. For example, details on DNS queries received and DNS replies sent by the Men&Mice virtual appliances can now be logged for further processing by enabling and utilizing the powerful DNSTAP feature with minimal performance impact on the appliances. They can also function as NTP (Network Time Protocol) servers and be served by the same network infrastructure as DNS and DHCP.

Private, Hybrid, and Public Clouds

Every cloud vendor is different. Different platforms and configurations offer different advantages (and drawbacks) for customers. They also offer very different, and often incompatible APIs. Men&Mice Suite v9.1 services complex enterprise hybrid and multi-cloud networks by providing single-pane-of-glass visibility and cross-platform functionality for DNS, DHCP and IPAM (DDI) operations, whose networks use either multiple cloud (cloud native) vendors or a combination of on-prem and cloud (hybrid).

The ability to bulk migrate DNS zones and DHCP scopes, ability to implement role-based authorizations, as well as providing 3 management interfaces (Windows-based management console, web-based management application and REST, SOAP and JSON-RPC APIs), the Men&Mice Suite v9.1 overlay software solution eliminates many of the complexities of today's large-scale networks while mitigating DNS failures such as configuration errors and DDoS attacks.

Further, Men&Mice Suite's xDNS Redundancy provides a level of abstraction that builds automation, provides centralized views, eliminates human error and removes conflicting DNS service provider platform complexities (e.g. incompatible APIs).

The Men&Mice Suite v9.1 also allows organizations to add Active Directory zones to xDNS groups. This, tied with the read-only members of xDNS groups, makes it easy for organizations to bring their internal, on-premises DNS into their virtual private clouds, and vice versa.

Cloud operations monitoring, a topic to which we’re looking greatly forward discussing at VMworld, is transparent and easy in the Men&Mice Suite v9.1. Not only have we integrated true cloud DNS into the Men&Mice Suite, but we also paid attention to the cloud-unique challenges it brings with it.

Can’t make it? No worries!

You can book an appointment to meet our team onsite at VMWorld (Booth #2124).

Or, if you’re missing the event, book a walk-thru any time by clicking the button below.

We’re always happy showcase the benefits of deploying our best-in-class overlay management solution on top of your network.