Backup and recovery developer Veeam Software has released version 6 of its Management Pack (MP) for VMware, which offers midsized and large IT organizations using Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) System Center additional forecasting and planning capabilities to better manage VMware (NYSE: VMW) environments.

According to Veeam, the new MP release extends System Center with VMware monitoring, management and capacity planning and offers a unified view from a single console of both physical and virtual infrastructures and applications.

“Virtualization is now the dominant environment within the modern data center, so managing it effectively has become absolutely vital to the health of the enterprise,” said Ratmir Timashev, Veeam president and chief executive. “With the Veeam MP v6, organizations can take control of their virtual VMware environment using a management framework they already know very well [in] Microsoft System Center.”

The new release of Veeam MP includes new capacity planning reports for VMware on host failure modeling, performance forecasts for data stores, performance forecasts for vSphere clusters, and VM capacity prediction. The reports can bring potential capacity issues to IT’s attention before problems arise, and also include what-if modeling to help IT address questions such as, “What would happen to performance if this host failed?” and, “How many days do I have before this VM runs out of storage?”

Other MP v6 features include:

With the new MP release, which is available now, Veeam is trying to stir up new business, offering 10 free sockets and one full year of maintenance for free to new MP users worldwide who have or plan to deploy Microsoft System Center. The license is perpetual and contains full functionality.