vKernel announced the release of version 4.5 of their vOperations Suite today.
What’s New:

• New Automation Features - vOPS' automation capabilities are enhanced with auto-deletion of abandoned VM images, auto-merging of unused snapshots, an additional automated remediation for performance issues and auto-calculation of future resource requirements.
• Automation Controls - vOPS 4.5 also adds the ability to more finally control some automation processes. For example, VMs can be grouped, and then these groups set with minimum and maximum resource amounts that automated right-sizing will respect.
• vSphere 5 New Feature Support - vOPS 4 introduced compatability to vSphere 5. vOPS 4.5 takes this integration further with support for storage DRS and storage clusters, new HA methods and inclusion of data provided by the VASA storage interface.

vKernel will try to provide “trusted automation” – and with vOPS 4.5, data center staff will be able to automatically

• Delete abandoned VMDK Files
• Merge VM snapshots
• Solve VM performance issues
• Power-off Zombie VMs
• Resize vCPU and VM memory resources based on vOPS’ recommendations
• Update management dashboards in real-time in external systems
• Calculate CPU, memory and storage requirements at any point in the future

Each one of these automation features will help avoid the need to hire in additional administrators as environments grow. For example, a VM administrator can manually delete approximately 60 abandoned VM images in one hour. With automated deletion of abandoned VM images, an unlimited amount of files can be deleted in seconds.

Other features available in vOPS 4.5 include:

• Application type tags to denote which application is running inside a virtual machine
• Storage DRS and storage cluster support (available in VMware vSphere 5)
• Access to VMware VASA interface storage statistics available in vSphere 5
• Capacity planning calculation adjustments for vSphere 5 HA methods
• Improved support and visibility into Raw Device Mapping (RDM) storage objects
• Additional management reports such as graphs for performance issue counts
• Auto-set VM metric trend alarms that generate warnings when abnormalities are detected

Here is a short video on the new features.