VMware recently acquired several software assets from its parent EMC that foretell the future of virtualization management. The assets include Configuration Manager (formerly Configuresoft), FastScale, Application Discovery Manager (formerly nLayers), and service management tools (from Infra). These are all part of EMC's Ionix infrastructure management portfolio.
Looking at the assets collectively, one theme is clear - holistic management is increasingly becoming an important pillar for greater adoption of virtualization.
So, what specific areas do these technologies cover and why are they important?
One of the key aspects of this move is broader realization within the industry that visibility of both physical and virtual environments is critical. Right now and for many years to come, critical business applications will continue to traverse physical as well as virtual infrastructure. Management tools will increasingly need to provide visibility of both P+V layers to effectively manage the availability and performance of these critical business applications.
Configuration management and application dependency mapping are increasingly becoming salient requirements for any large-scale virtualization deployment. The ability to catch "configuration drifts" in critical business applications as they are deployed and dynamically moved across virtual infrastructure is important to prevent unintended consequences. Application dependency mapping also helps to connect the virtual infrastructure with the business services they serve. Once the relationship of infrastructure and business services is understood by the management tool it helps prioritize the infrastructure faults and reduces risk of negative financial impact.
Another important feature in virtualization management is the ability to tie the virtual infrastructure to established management processes. This includes availability and performance management, escalation and notification, proactive alerting and root-cause analysis. Also, the ability to tie the infrastructure availability (or lack thereof) to a Help Desk is another key factor to ensure that the cost savings of virtualization are not squandered due to lack of operational visibility and resulting unplanned outages of critical business services.
As a speaker at a recent event commented, "it's time to take off the training wheels from virtualization management..."
I look forward to discussing these and many other related topics next week at CA World.
We have put together an exciting lineup of sessions under the Virtualization and Service Automation track. In this track you will hear CA experts and customers talk about CA solutions to address these and many other challenges related to virtualization management.
Please be sure to check out some of these sessions:
For the full list of sessions, please visit here.
See you in Vegas...