CA this week updated several of its management software applications with additional support for Cisco and VMware products to help customers manage today’s and tomorrow’s advanced networks, applications and cross-platform computing environments. 

CA updated its Spectrum Infrastructure Manager, eHealth Performance Manager and Spectrum Automation Manager to support Cisco Nexus 1000V distributed virtual switch software and VMware vSphere 4. Enhancing support for the two vendors will help CA customers manage physical, virtual and cloud environments, says Stephen Elliot, vice president of strategy for CA's Infrastructure Management and Data Center Automation business unit.

“We have looked at the types of equipment not only historically but also down the road that customers are looking to adopt and enabling customers to consider new ways of management,” Elliot says. “It is not longer a question of if customers are virtualizing, but how much and management discussions go well beyond the network, server or storage and focus on the end-to-end service management.”

And the components making up services in today’s enterprise environments include a broader range of network equipment, virtual software and computing environments – as many companies consider putting applications in the cloud or choosing software-as-a-service apps from their vendors. Management software makers, such as CA, must be able to manage that service across multiple environments and deliver the data to enterprise IT managers in a simplified manner – which means supporting vendors such as Cisco and VMware, Elliot says.

“No one vendor is going to be able to do it all and customers want to know how CA will evolve to support virtualization as it becomes more embedded into the infrastructure and network devices,” he says. “We are advancing how our management and automation technologies can take advantage of the data the network and infrastructure elements present.”

For instance, CA’s object model will include a “hierarchical view” of VMware vCenter Server hosts, vSphere 4 hosts, data centers, clusters, resource pools, virtual switches and virtual machines. The applications will also be able to detect and track VMware VMotion migrations and perform event correlation and root-cause analysis to help suppress “symptomatic alarms,” CA says. And the software will present a consolidated view of both virtual and physical environments to enable customers to manage both with one console.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.