Avocent - don't forget the underlying infrastructure

Avocent's Chief Technology Officer and Executive VP Corporate Strategy, Ben Grimes, spent some time with me a short while ago to discuss the importance of bridging the gap between the physical infrastructure and the virtual environments it supports. As with a few others I've spoken with in the past, Ben stressed that while today's systems are far more reliable than those offered in the past, they're not perfect. Furthermore, a large percentage of outages that occur in the virtual world have more to do with configuration errors or operational problems than hardware failures.

Ben then brought me up to date on Avocent's datacenter management software, including LANDesk and DSView 3.

It's clear to me that as organizations use various forms of virtualization technology to increase performance, scalability, reliability, optimization and the like, they also ought to be on top of what the underlying physical infrastructure is doing or not doing. Outages seen by an end user may come from a frozen database server or a failed piece of hardware. Tracking these things down in real time can be very difficult in a complex, virtualized environment.

What tools are being used by your organization to make sure that the multiple virtual worlds that have been deployed are happy?