Men&Mice Suite version 6.9 released

Men&Mice the leading provider of DNS, DHCP and IP address Management software solutions (DDI), announces the release of version 6.9 of the Men&Mice Suite.

The Men&Mice Suite is a software based IP Address Management (IPAM) solution, used for managing many of the largest and most critical networks in the world. This new version further strengthens the Men&Mice lead when it comes to IPAM for Microsoft Active Directory oriented networks where virtualization and private clouds matter.

The Men&Mice approach to IPAM is that manageability is added on top of existing DNS and DHCP servers. The Suite provides the required manageability and overview while guaranteeing that current DNS and DHCP servers retain authority over DNS and DHCP configurations. As a result the Suite can provide seamless integration on hybrid networks with tight MS/AD integration where required.

The Suite is a great tool for network administrators for daily administration, planning, auditing and reporting in large networks.

Among new features in version 6.9 are:

System Health Monitoring

The Men&Mice Suite Health Monitoring feature provides administrators with a good overview of the general health of the Men&Mice Suite and other related services, through the Health Bar in the Management Console.  More importantly, it will give administrators an indication if there is a problem that needs to be addressed.

The Health Monitor status indicators are split into five categories, where each category represents a specific part of the system;

• Men&Mice Suite
• DNS
• DHCP
• IPAM
• Appliances

Warnings and errors

The Health Monitoring feature uses color codes to represent the severity of a status indicator. A warning or an error is shown as yellow or red, respectively; otherwise as green.
Expanding the Health bar on a warning or an error gives more detail and description in a separate window, as well as the opportunity to navigate to the object that is affected and fix it from there.

Examples of warnings and errors could be slave zones that are expiring or a zone that has not been loaded on a server due to an error. Both errors can cause outages for users and therefore have a serious impact on their business.

Virtual Routing and Forwarding Support (VRF Support)

VRF support allows for multiple instances of routing tables to coexist on a single router and work together in such a way that IP addresses can be re-used and don’t conflict with each other.

The Men&Mice Suite communicates with routers to retrieve information for the subnet and host discovery functionality. Now, the Men&Mice Suite also supports retrieving information from VRF enabled routers.

Other Improvements

Version 6.9 also improves other aspects of the Suite, featuring enhanced Subnet Discovery, management of reverse records and further security enhancements for the Men&Mice Appliances.