BladeLogic

Products

• Overview
• Operations Manager
  • Discovery Manager
  • Compliance Manager
  • Configuration Manager
  • Virtualization Manager
• Application Release Manager
• Orchestration Manager

Operations Manager

• Overview
• Challenges & Solutions

Virtualization Manager

The term virtualization broadly describes the process by which a data center resource is abstracted and separated from the underlying physical delivery of that resource. This virtual infrastructure or abstraction layer provides the means to manage pooled resources across the enterprise, resulting in data centers that are more responsive to changing requirements and business needs. Virtualization has emerged as important data center technology since it enables IT organizations to tackle challenges associated with key data center initiatives, such as server consolidation, optimizing testing and development environments, and ensuring business continuity through high availability and disaster recovery.

With the proliferation of virtualization technology in today's data centers, IT organizations require a unified approach to managing, controlling and enforcing configuration changes to their server and application environments, regardless of whether the environment is virtual or physical. With the emergence of strict IT compliance controls, regulatory pressures are putting an unprecedented emphasis on managing granular server and application configurations. For example, internal and external auditors do not differentiate between physical and virtual environments. Also, maintaining critical applications in a virtual environment adds additional pressures for controlling the virtual server infrastructure.

BladeLogic Virtualization Manager enables IT organizations to manage both physical and virtual environments from a unified management platform resulting in greater infrastructure consistency and reduced downtime. Through BladeLogic Virtualization Manager's integrated approach, it is transparent to an end user whether a given server or application service being managed is running on a physical machine or on a virtual instance residing in a virtual container.

Key areas where BladeLogic provides integrated management of virtual and physical server environments are:

• Integrated CMDB—Ability to discover, inventory and classify physical and virtual server environments in a single Configuration Management Database (CMDB). Identify servers that are candidates for virtualization. Track migration to virtual environments over time.
• Provisioning—Provision new virtual server infrastructure (virtual containers) in a manner consistent with other bare-metal provisioning strategies in accordance with the build policies. For example, a customer might want to implement a consistent process for provisioning a physical Apache Web Server, a virtual Apache Web Server, or a physical VMWare ESX server.
• Configuration Change Control—Manage, control, and enforce configuration changes to the customer's virtual infrastructure environment. For example, a customer might want to add a new virtual RedHat server, limit which virtual servers a user can stop and start, and audit to ensure that all production VMWare Windows instances are allocated the minimum recommended RAM.
• Migration Across Environments—Create new release or update packages within virtual and physical environments and promote seamlessly across them. For example, a customer might want to promote a new application change from virtual development and QA environment instances to a physical production environment. Alternatively, a customer might want to implement a consistent process for security, patch, or regulatory compliance across their entire server environment. Environment transparency with consistent packaging and promotion models ensures consistent releases and migrations.
• Compliance—Audit all configuration changes to physical and virtual environments in a consistent manner to ensure compliance with security, operational, and regulatory requirements. For example, a customer might want to produce a report to provide evidence to auditors that their virtual infrastructure is secured and that all changes to the virtual infrastructure are documented regardless of how the change is applied.