Vendors scramble to rein in virtual environments

A handful of management vendors recently updated their portfolios to address what industry watchers have pegged as must-have capabilities for enterprise IT managers responsible for virtual resources.

HP, via its technology partnership with VMware, updated several management and monitoring software applications to be able to not only identify virtual machines but also inventory the operating systems and applications running on them for compliance or chargeback capabilities. For instance, the HP Asset Manager with Discovery and Dependency Mapping product automatically discovers virtual environments, measures the usage of virtual-machine-installed software and tracks license compliance, the company says. HP SiteScope can automatically determine how to monitor performance and availability, via agent-based or agent-less technologies. Considering IT managers may not be able to install an agent on some virtual instances, the company says it's critical to be able to gather data without using agents.

In addition, HP's updates enable one tool to manage both physical and virtual servers, a feature that should be considered mandatory by enterprise IT managers.

"It is critical to manage virtualization in the same way the physical environment is managed. It should not be separate from other management efforts because that lack of coordination will cause all sorts of problems when troubleshooting, planning for capacity or provisioning resources," says Andi Mann, research director at Enterprise Management Associates.

HP competitor BMC also announced upgrades across its product suite. In particular, BMC updated its Performance Management software with enhanced support for VMware's Virtual Infrastructure 3 and VMotion as well as the capability to monitor the virtual infrastructure, guest virtual machines and applications. The management software maker also tapped its RealOps acquisition to provide run-book automation capabilities specific to VMware environments. Most important, industry watchers say, is that BMC equipped its software to be able to relate virtual elements and resources to the overall business service to help IT understand how performance problems within that environment will impact critical customer or user-facing applications.

"BMC is offering performance management, monitoring of availability and changes, and tying that into their [business service management] portfolio -- what is critical for the business and what infrastructure is attached to this critical business service, virtual or physical," Forrester's Hubbert says.

Meanwhile, the management heavyweights face competition from virtual systems management start-ups such as Embotics, Fortisphere and VKernel, all of which have made product enhancements to showcase at VMworld. For their part, Embotics and VKernel separately made available free downloadable versions of their software offerings to help IT managers get started with the technology and inspire them to invest in enterprise versions.