ManageIQ releases EVM 2.0

Joe Fitzgerald, CEO of ManageIQ, gave me an update on what his company was doing and the improvements that would be in the second version of the company's Enterprise Virtualization Management™ (EVM) Suite. Joe's rich experience in management technology really shows during our discussions.

Here's how ManageIQ describes EVM 2.0

 The EVM suite was designed and built to support the unique demands of virtual management and automation. EVM Suite Version 2.0 contains significant enhancements based on feedback from enterprises strategically leveraging virtualization technology. The suite currently includes EVM Insight and EVM Control.

EVM Insight - Delivers real-time visibility with continuous, agent-free discovery and tracking of configuration information, configuration drift, genealogy, and relationship mapping. Enhancements to EVM Insight include:

• Comprehensive Real-time Discovery - Expanded discovery capabilities now include support for VLANs, LUNs, additional virtual appliances, OVF formatted containers, and more detailed discovery of virtual machine resources including snapshots. New customer extensible discovery capabilities enable the discovery of unique information such as registry settings, files and configuration parameters. EVM’s agent-free discovery enables managers to quickly identify and assess VMs, control VM sprawl, and easily identify offline VMs that require patching or updates.
• Baselining and Drift Comparison - Expanded to include hosts, network resources, VM disk information, management metadata, and virtual hardware configuration. Comparisons yield quick identification of configuration changes in the virtual infrastructure, simplifying and speeding compliance monitoring and problem resolution.
• Relationship & Dependency Mapping - Automatic identification and mapping of relationships across a wider range of virtual resources, including virtual machines and appliances, genealogy, hosts, clusters, data centers, OVF, networking and storage components. Mapping and visualization of the many complex relationships in the virtual environment improves reliability, simplifies problem resolution and increases availability.
• Visualization & Reporting - Expanded Virtual Intelligence capabilities include improved Virtual Timelines, which now include additional events and are customizable; additional out of the box reports; alerts and RSS feeds which include moves, adds, and changes for VMs, hosts, offline VM patch levels and more. EVM’s Virtual Intelligence provides analytics and visualization of the virtual environment, and supports information sharing through reports, graphs, and charts, as well as web-services, alerts and RSS feeds.

EVM Control provides real-time, policy-based management, security, and compliance capabilities for virtualized environments. Policy-based automation at key operations, configuration and life cycle points enforce IT standards, improve reliability and availability, and reduce risk. Enhancements to EVM Control include:

• Policy-Based Management - The new model-based EVM Policy Administrator which simplifies specification of even complex policies. The new Policy Template Library provides a ready-to-use set of policies containing common configuration management policies.
• Configurable Policy Enforcement - Support for additional policy-enforcement points, including when taking snapshots, at cloning, and before other reconfiguration activities. Expanded enforcement points enable more precise control of the virtual environment.
• Adaptive Policy Engine - New support for multiple policy profiles, model-based policy specification and expanded set of out-of-the-box policy actions. These enable policy reuse, delegation and provide additional control and automation.
• Role Delegation & Separation of Duties - Role-Based Access Control now supports authentication and access control via integration with enterprise LDAP directories. Delegated VM administration and operations, snapshot management and virtual machine console access is now supported from EVM Console for authorized users.

EVM Insight and EVM Control will be generally available in July 2008.

Snapshot Analysis

Over 20 companies are offering products that manage all or a portion of the resources that make up a virtualized environment. Most of these suppliers are taking an approach that requires their customers to either install an agent on each and every system or install a special driver in the operating system of each virtual client or server. ManageIQ is one of the few who are taking a different approach.

ManageIQ's technical gurus came to the conclusion that if they watched and controlled network traffic, they would be able to do what was necessary to discover resources, configure those resources and administer those resources. ManageIQ’s patent-pending SmartState™ technology was designed to do just that.

The presentations and demonstrations I've seen of ManageIQ's technology have been impressive. I would suggest that IT decision-makers ask for a demo themselves. I'm sure that they'll go away impressed as well.