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.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.