ManageIQ Launches EVM Insight and EVM Control

I had the opportunity to speak with some of the executives of ManageIQ yesterday. I had spoken with them when they were with NovaDigm (now part of HP) and I was with IDC. It was good to catch up with them before. But I digress.

ManageIQ is launching a couple of new management products for organizations making heavy use of virtual machine technology. Rather than trying to do everything for everyone everywhere, the company appears focused on technology that implements the best of configuration management technology.

Here's how the company describes their new products:

EVM Insight™- establishes a foundation for control and automation of virtualized environments by discovering and maintaining accurate configuration information, unique identification, genealogy, and relationship mapping for virtual assets. Comprehensive information and analysis is provided for hosts, virtual machines, virtual appliances, VMware® VirtualCenter instances, storage and network elements, operating systems, applications, patches, and accounts.

EVM Control™- provides real-time, policy-based management, security, and compliance controls over virtual assets. These policy-based controls, applied against virtual assets at key operations and configuration life cycle points, ensure the enforcement of IT standards, improve reliability and availability, and reduce risk.

The company is also offering a suite that combines both products.

Snapshot Analysis

There are companies that view management of virtualized resources as something new and strikingly different than anything we've seen before. They would say that resources that come and go as the workload demands or move from one machine to another to help the datacenter meet service level agreements just can't be managed using traditional tools.

ManageIQ takes a different approach. The ManageIQ approach starts with configuration management that's non-intrusive (doesn't require the installation of agents). It then adds tools that can discover, evaluate and log information about both running or quiescent virtual servers into a configuration database. Finally, it offers reporting tools that are both graphical and support todays Web-based management consoles.

When asked about other commonly discussed management tools for virtualized environments, such as replication, orchestration and the like, the good folks at ManageIQ insisted that they want to focus on the tools organizations most need today. They'll develop partnerships with other companies as needed to work within the most important virtualization ecosystems.

If these folks' track record is a guide to future success, ManageIQ is going to be a company to watch. I hope to speak with one or more of their customers in the future.