Virtualization drives management software upgrades

Industry analysis by Beth Schultz, plus the latest news headlines.

You could name any three management vendors and chances are they'd all be adding support for virtual systems. Yet it may be more difficult to find three that are coupling their virtualization monitoring capabilities with advanced analytics.

That’s the common thread tying Configuresoft, EMC and Netuitive together this week. Each vendor separately announced updates or new products designed to provide expert analysis to the virtual realm.

For its part Configuresoft introduced Enterprise Configuration Manager (ECM) 5.1 with a VMware VirtualCenter Compliance Plug-in that the company says enables VMware administrators to achieve compliance across virtual and physical infrastructure. The automated analysis enables administrators to ensure that a change made across the environment doesn't impact pre-defined policies.

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You could name any three management vendors and chances are they'd all be adding support for virtual systems. Yet it may be more difficult to find three that are coupling their virtualization monitoring capabilities with advanced analytics.

That’s the common thread tying Configuresoft, EMC and Netuitive together this week. Each vendor separately announced updates or new products designed to provide expert analysis to the virtual realm.

For its part Configuresoft introduced Enterprise Configuration Manager (ECM) 5.1 with a VMware VirtualCenter Compliance Plug-in that the company says enables VMware administrators to achieve compliance across virtual and physical infrastructure. The automated analysis enables administrators to ensure that a change made across the environment doesn't impact pre-defined policies.

"Analytics consolidates and correlates data from disparate data systems and with compliance, it helps validate and verify that a change is within policies," said George Gerchow, Configuresoft's technology strategist. "We can give you compliance reporting across the stack via Configuration Intelligence Analytics. It reports where changes are taking place, which is impacted, what's wrong and how to fix it."

ECM 5.1 is available now and pricing for the software starts at $995 per server ad $40 per workstation.

Separately EMC announced it had applied its root-cause analysis technology to virtual systems monitoring with Smarts Server Manager, an add-on product to the vendor's Smarts Service Assurance Manager and Smarts IP Availability Manager.

The software performs root-cause analysis, correlation and troubleshooting capabilities EMC acquired with Smarts to the virtual realm. According to a 2008 EMC survey, 48% of 156 respondents cited the difficulty in isolating root cause of problems across a virtualized data center as a primary management challenge. The second top response from 44% was the difficulty in isolating performance issues across a virtualized data center.

The software will help customers by adding automated discovery, monitoring and problem isolation for VMware ESX servers, the virtual machines and applications on which they run, and clustering environments, according to Bob Quillin, EMC's senior director of product marketing.

"Customers can't fully realize the benefits of virtualization and consolidation if they can't take control of the environment, and automation is one of the ways EMC is helping our customers simplify management of virtual data centers," Quillin says.

Available now, EMC Smarts Server Manager is priced at $30,000 for EMC customers.

Also this week, Netuitive further enhanced its analytics capabilities for the virtual realm. The company had previously announced a stand-alone product aimed at monitoring virtual systems and now it has integrated those capabilities into its SI software. Now company executives say customers can use one tool to monitor physical and virtual resources and apply Netuitive's analytics to better determine what IT performance means for the business.

"The big addition of the product is adding virtualization into the analytics fold, and we did this because we have seen a major maturation of the space," says Nicola Sanna, president and CEO at Netuitive.

Priced at $1,250 per socket, Netuitive SI is available now.

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Read more about infrastructure management in Network World's Infrastructure Management section.

Schultz is a longtime IT journalist. You can email her or find her here.