Published: March 25 2011, 12:24 PM | 1 Comment(s)
by Don Ferguson

Platform and virtualization providers like VMware are providing increasingly more management and security capabilities. Other examples include Microsoft System Center Operations Manager's support for Hyper-V and Cisco UCS Manager. CA Technologies partners with VMware, Cisco, Microsoft and other virtual infrastructure providers, and we integrate with their management products. Our products provide significant value that complements the vendors' products.

The first benefit is obvious - cross-platform, multi-vendor environments. Many enterprise customers will have a mix of virtualization technology - Cisco UCS, Linux in mainframe virtual environments, Amazon EC2, etc. A CA Technologies core capability is managing, automating and securing heterogeneous environments. The capability also includes supporting a hybrid environment of physical and virtual infrastructure.

There are three additional, extremely significant capabilities our products provide relative to platform and infrastructure vendors' products. These are managing, automating and securing:

• 1. Application software inside the virtual infrastructure.
• 2. Composite IT systems that span multiple virtual systems, even if the systems use the same virtualization technology.
• 3. End-to-end transactions that flow through composite virtual systems.

Application awareness is the foundation for the value. Figure 1 is an overview of the Virtual Computing Environment's (VCE) representation of a virtual infrastructure package. VCE provides tremendous value and is a major advancement in virtualizations. In the figure, "Applications" look like frosting on a cake. There are two issues with the figures in this representation:

• 1. The complexity of the application layer is as great--or greater--than the complexity of the underlying hardware, operating system and hypervisor (Figure 2).
• 2. The value of the infrastructure comes from the applications. Enterprises deploy infrastructure to run applications.

There are hard problems in managing virtual environments beyond managing virtual images on a hardware grid. An important problem is managing and securing what is inside the virtual machines. Much of the value of management products derives from managing the applications inside the virtual machines to meet business objectives.

CA Technologies has a wealth of solutions and expertise for managing various software configurations/dependencies, problem resolution, performance management and automation and security associated with the delivery of business applications and services. Managing the software inside virtual machines is similar to managing software configurations on physical machines.

Examples of CA Technologies ability to manage the software stack are:

• 1. A library of agents and probes for monitoring application servers, database systems and packaged applications.
• 2. Application configuration management blueprints for discovering software configuration and dependencies, and managing compliance and change.
• 3. Security products supporting provisioning identity and managing access control for different types of software.

Building on application aware management and security is support for composite systems. Any non-trivial application is a composite application. A composite application requires a composite IT system. This is also true in virtual computing environments. Any non-trivial application is a set of interconnected, interdependent virtual systems (Figure 3). A significant issue with any environment is the behavior of the composite. CA Technologies has excellent technology for discovery, monitoring, problem/performance, automation, configuration and security management of composite IT systems. This technology and expertise applies directly to non-trivial composite IT environments. Examples include:

• 1. CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager's ability to analyze faults and events and determine the impact on composite IT systems implementing business services (applications).
• 2. CA Identity Manager's ability to implement automation workflows for provisioning identities into multiple security registries that the systems in the composite environment use.
• 3. CA Access Control's ability to segment privileged user capabilities across the virtualized environment and the hypervisors.
• 4. CA CMDB's ability to represent composite IT system representing services, and control and manage change.
• 5. CA Automation Suite for Data Centers' ability to automate the complex, multi-step workflow associated with the provisioning and reconfiguring the software in a composite system.
• 6. CA 3Tera AppLogic's functions for assembling composite IT systems and producing reusable templates. A previous blog entry explains the concepts. A common misperception is that AppLogic competes with VCE, UCS, etc. In fact, our strategy is to complement the platforms' management products

These capabilities become increasingly valuable when the composite IT system spans:

• 1. Multiple hypervisor platforms (VMware, Hyper-V, zLinux, etc.), network virtualization and storage virtualization.
• 2. A combination of physical and virtual systems.
• 3. Both on-premise and external cloud infrastructure. A simple example is an on-premise, multi-VM application that interacts with an application on Force.com.

Finally, applications exist to implement transactions or end-to-end operations. Examples include "account open," "submit shopping cart," and "change credit card." CA Technologies security and assurance products provide capabilities for managing these end-to-end transactions. Examples include:

• 1. The ability of CA Application Performance Management and CA NetQoS to track end-to-end transaction performance and impact of specific systems on performance.
• 2. CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager's ability to correlate and understand faults to determine the root cause of transaction errors.
• 3. CA Enterprise Log Manager's ability to collect access control events and analyze compliance.

These examples are just a partial list of the capabilities that CA Technologies provides IT organizations that need to resource-efficiently optimize service levels in heterogeneous virtualized computing environments. It is very challenging to get past the mere maintenance of particular infrastructure elements and actually manage the end-to-end delivery of composite applications. Our capabilities complement the offerings of VMware, VCE and other virtualization vendors.