Virtual systems management vendors gear up for VMworld

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

Virtual systems management vendors continue to ramp up their products to support advanced features in VMware technology and help enterprise IT managers better control their growing virtual environments.

Managing application performance in a virtual environment

This week virtual systems start-ups Embotics and Surgient separately made news around virtual systems by offering enhanced management capabilities designed to address the more mature needs of companies broadening their virtual environments – but trying to reduce costs and maintain flat budgets. The companies plan to showcase their tools next week at VMworld 2009 in San Francisco.

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Virtual systems management vendors continue to ramp up their products to support advanced features in VMware technology and help enterprise IT managers better control their growing virtual environments.

Managing application performance in a virtual environment

This week virtual systems start-ups Embotics and Surgient separately made news around virtual systems by offering enhanced management capabilities designed to address the more mature needs of companies broadening their virtual environments – but trying to reduce costs and maintain flat budgets. The companies plan to showcase their tools next week at VMworld 2009 in San Francisco.

For its part, Embotics unveiled its V-Commander 3.0, the most recent release of the company’s flagship software. With this release, Embotics executives say they decided to offer the product in three modules, which can be implemented in phases by enterprise IT managers. The company broke the software into separate applications that can be deployed in stages to address the following: Federated Inventory Management; Resource & Cost Management; and Operational & Risk Management.

“V-Commander 3.0 offers a pragmatic approach to building a management environment for the virtual world that is cost-effective and efficient. It allows companies to grow their virtual environments without having to also add more staff and resources to maintain and support that environment,” says David Lynch, vice president of marketing at Embotics.

V-Commander 3.0 is available now and is priced between $85 and $110 per core, depending on module

Separately, Surgient updated its Virtual Automation Platform to Version 7. With this release, Surgient extended its integration with HP Operations Orchestration to include HP Server Automation and HP Network Automation. This enhanced integration enables customers to add virtual infrastructure provisioning capabilities via self-service options and jointly manage and provision virtual and physical servers as a single service, according to Surgient. The vendor also added integration with vCenter Server and vSphere 4 to better enable IT managers to automate failover and manage maintenance windows for self-service infrastructure and move virtual machines off of hosts as needed.

“We have found that although enterprise IT organizations have made significant efficiency gains with virtualization, they are still challenged to provide complex, user-centric services with their limited staff and resources. They’re looking for ways to speed delivery while maintaining control of the infrastructure and enforcing compliance,” said Tim Lucas, chief executive officer of Surgient, in a statement.

Scheduled to be available by the end of 2009, Surgient Virtual Automation Platform 7 is priced starting at $25,000.

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