ManageIQ Launches into Virtualization Management

The virtualization management space is really starting to heat up. Recently announced new comers Embotics and Fortisphere are now being joined by ManageIQ, a company founded and managed by a team of people who helped Novadigm down the path of acquisition by Hewlett Packard.

ManageIQ has launched its new virtualization management suite – Enterprise Virtualization Management or EVM – which it believes will help organizations address the current challenges of managing virtual environments.

The initial product offerings in the EVM suite includes EVM Insight, which enables organizations to better understand their virtual environment, and EVM Control, which provides the foundation for a strong policy and compliance management program.

EVM Insight delivers the following:

• Comprehensive Real-Time Discovery – captures and automatically maintains indepth configuration information through SmartState technology. Detailed configuration information is captured for hosts, virtual machines, virtual appliances, VirtualCenter instances, storage and network elements, OS, applications, patches, and accounts.

• Identification and Tracking – assigns unique identifiers to virtual resources for reliable tracking and recording of operational and configuration events across infrastructures and lifecycles using patent-pending Virtual BlackBox technology. Real-time event and configuration correlation enables point-of-origin, relationship, and genealogy mapping.

• Visualization and Reporting – delivers a rich set of reports, graphs and analytics about the virtual infrastructure with customizable role-based views and comprehensive relationship mapping, including genealogy, virtual services, host affinity, and snapshot trees. A unique Virtual Timeline supports user-friendly time-based presentation of infrastructure events, including configuration events such as discovery, operation events such as start and stop, and policy events. Patent-pending Virtual Thumbnails create an iconized, visual representation of information associated with virtual machine guests and hosts, including their status and level of compliance with policies.

• Baselining, Comparison and Drift Analysis – enables the identification and articulation of fine-grained differences between configuration versions, deviations over time, genealogical changes, and ad hoc comparisons. These powerful capabilities enhance impact and problem analysis, release management, and standards compliance in virtual environments.

EVM Control provides the following:

• Configurable Policy Enforcement – enables policy enforcement anywhere throughout the lifecycle, across a range of operational and configuration points, providing maximum flexibility. Policies can be applied to desired points such as on discovery, creation, or cloning, before starting or stopping machines, and during release and change management events. A centralized policy store ensures updates are immediately effective, assuring the most current version of policies are always enforced.

• Adaptive Policy Engine – dynamically determines the optimal combination of configuration, operations, security, and business policies appropriate for an event, a host, or a virtual machine. The engine leverages real-time configuration information about the virtual environment in selecting and applying policies, enabling policy enforcement against even new or unknown machines. Offline VMs can be fully evaluated, minimizing risk, and allowing the identification of systems requiring updates without the overhead required to start systems before they can be managed.

• Policy Actions – provides a comprehensive and extensible set of automated responses to policy decisions such as generating notifications, issuing warnings, and quarantining or disabling virtual machines. EVM Control can also invoke workflows or user-defined scripts and automation to address complex remediation issues.

• Simulation and On-Demand Enforcement – evaluates interactions between policies to perform “what if” and impact analysis, and ensure a safe transition of new policies to a managed environment. Policy checks verify correct configurations are in place, before deployment or during activities like problem determination.

• Role Delegation and Separation of Duties – enables domain owners to define and implement only those policies appropriate to their operational responsibilities. Logging and Auditing – documents and records system modifications and policy changes with a detailed history of changes and transactions.

The company is already a VMware Technical Alliance Partner as well as a XenSource XenReady Partner. Using those alliances, the company plans to support VMware, Microsoft and Xen environments once the product releases with availability planned for December 2007. Pricing for this technology will start at $25,000.