EMC appliance discovers virtual resources

EMC announced upgrades to its application mapping technology Tuesday that the vendor says will help datacenter managers discover, monitor, and manage physical and virtual resources with one tool.

The vendor at its EMC World conference in Las Vegas introduced Application Discovery Manager (ADM) 6.0, which features support for VMware (an EMC company) VirtualCenter environments. The support, EMC representatives say, will enable datacenter managers to discover virtual resources and monitor them alongside physical servers in their environments.

"Customers are in the phase of aligning virtualization resources within the physical environment, but also discovering the virtual machines' relationships amongst each other," says Bob Quillin, EMC's senior director of product marketing for the resource management software group. "ADM 6.0 understands the relationships between the physical machines and the virtual environment and helps customers make more informed decisions when adding VMs, which ultimately support critical business applications and services."

Built on technology EMC acquired with nLayers, ADM 6.0 gives users an inventory of applications and maps how they are linked to IT resources, such as servers, network devices and storage arrays. A built-in dependency catalog lets enterprises keep track of software and hardware configuration changes and compare them on a server-to-server basis.

By combining information about the application infrastructure that ADM collects with EMC Smarts' (also an acquired technology) root-cause analysis capabilities, IT can more easily pinpoint the impact of system events and changes, EMC says. (Compare  network configuration management products.)  

ADM 6.0 can map pre-deployment application dependencies to help IT plan for resource allocation in virtual environments. It can also help with managing migrations from physical to virtual by analyzing how VMware impacts existing applications, and it will map the dependencies of VMs and their application components running on a single server, EMC says. The product will also keep configurations consistent across both physical and virtual environments, as well as identify rogue ESX Servers not under management of VirtualCenter.

"ADM 6.0 has the unique capability to look at the virtual switch inside ESX servers and watch traffic, which helps customers understand how VMs are participating in relation to the overall application," Quillin says. "It brings visibility to the virtual environment."

Also new to the ADM product is support for EMC's IT Compliance Analyzer -- Application Edition 1.1, also announced at EMC World Tuesday. Combining the two capabilities enables datacenter managers to ensure their VMware environments remain compliant with regulatory requirements such as PCI DSS and HIPAA, EMC says.