taneja group report-overview of the virtual infrastructure operations management market

Copyright 2011 The Taneja Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 1 of 21 87 Elm Street, Suite 900 Hopkinton, MA 01748 T: 508.435.2556 F: 508.435.2557 www.tanejagroup.com

MARKET PROFILE

OVERVIEW OF THE VIRTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT MARKET

AUGUST 2011

In this report, Taneja Group presents our evaluation of the current state of the vir-tual infrastructure operations management (VIOM) market. Our objective was to examine VIOM solutions available from a representative set of established and emerging vendors, in order to enable senior business and technology managers to gain a deeper understanding of which vendors offer the most complete solutions and how they differ from one another.

We evaluated VMware’s vCenter Operations (VCOps) and ten competing virtual infrastructure moni-toring, analysis, management and planning solutions in two primary functional categories: technolo-gy platform features and operations management capabilities. For the technology category, we examined how each solution obtains, analyzes and presents key performance metrics to the user. For the operations management category, we looked at how each solution supports diagnosis, planning, and remediation for performance, capacity and configuration issues. We then used the capabilities of VCOps and VMWare’s overall virtual infrastructure management strategy as a baseline and explored how each competitive solution compared favorably or unfavorably to VMware’s.

We found that only VMware and BMC offer technology platforms and operations management fea-tures which are both broad and deep enough to be considered leading platforms for VIOM today. We also found that Quest, CA, Solarwinds, Netuitive, and VKernel offer significant technology innovations plus established capabilities for managing virtual infrastructures, and that these vendors make up a strong competitive “second tier.” The remaining vendors we evaluated—Xangati, Zenoss, Veeam, and Cirba—offer more limited features, and are better suited today as point solutions or management add-ons for particular use cases, as opposed to being fully-fledged operations management platforms.

Virtual Infrastructure Operations Management: A Rapidly-Evolving Market Overall, VMware stands out as a VIOM leader due to its broad solution reach; unique predictive per-formance analytics designed for virtual environments; integrated approach to workload, capacity, and configuration management; and intuitive, next-generation user interface. No other vendor in our assessment is yet executing as effectively and simultaneously along all of our evaluation criteria di-mensions.

Despite the competitive market being fragmented and evolving quickly—with many vendors claiming to simplify, accelerate, or optimize virtual infrastructure “performance”—strong solutions do exist, though it can be difficult to tell them apart. Vendors have entered this competitive space from very different directions, bringing with them a range of prior experiences and skill sets.

All vendors covered in this study can add value today to an established or growing virtual infrastruc-ture; the differences emerged when we investigated each in terms of technology innovation and focus on the virtual infrastructure, as well as on maturity and ability to execute.


VIOM Market Profile

Summary of Findings We scored each competitive vendor on a 5-point scale measuring technology platform features, oper-ations management capabilities, and virtual infrastructure focus and expertise (0 to 4, see Appendix A for details). A summary score was then generated for each vendor solution, in which a score of 0-1 indicates that the solution is not suitable today as a VIOM platform; 1-2 indicates limited suitability as a VIOM platform, or a point solution; 2-3 indicates a good starting point for a VIOM platform, with some advanced features; and 3-4 indicates a strong VIOM platform, with many advanced capabilities.

Figure 1: Competitive vendor solutions: technology platform and operations management factor scores

vCO

ps

En

terp

rise

BM

C

vCO

ps

Ad

van

ced

vCO

ps

Sta

nd

ard

Qu

est

CA

So

larw

ind

s

Net

uit

ive

VK

ern

el

Xan

gat

i

Zen

oss

Vee

am

Cir

ba

Technology Platform Features:

Infrastructure Monitoring 3 4 2 2 2 4 1 3 1 1 3 1 0

Predictive Analytics / Dynamic Baselining 4 4 4 4 0 0 0 4 0 2 0 0 0

Visualization & User Interface 4 3 4 4 3 2 3 3 2 2 3 1 1

Operations Management Features:

Diagnosis & Troubleshooting 3 4 3 3 3 2 2 4 2 4 2 1 0

Capacity Mgmt. & Planning 4 4 4 1 3 4 3 0 3 0 0 1 3

Configuration & Compliance 4 4 1 1 3 4 3 0 2 0 0 1 2

Virtualization Focus / Expertise: 4 1 4 4 4 1 4 2 4 3 1 4 1

SUMMARY SCORES

3 3.7 3 3.4 3 3.1 2 2.7 2 2.6 2 2.4 2 2.3 2 2.3 2 2.0 1 1.7 1 1.3 1 1.3 1 1.0

SOURCE: TANEJA GROUP

Why Compare Operations Management Solutions to VMware? We evaluated the VIOM market landscape against VMware’s products, solutions, and strategy for sev-eral reasons:

VMware is the undisputed x86 virtualization leader and the platform of choice for the vast majority of global enterprises and SMBs. As such, the performance of the VMware platform is critical to the performance of the broadest array of virtualized applications.

VMware’s vCenter Server is the primary source of performance data for most of the VIOM vendors we evaluated. Indeed, many vendors are in business primarily to add value to per-formance data already collected by vCenter.


VIOM Market Profile

VMware continues to build out the vCenter suite with added-value management solutions augmenting vCenter Server via acquisition and in-house development, and is a top competitor across all VIOM functional categories.

With vCenter Operations (VCOps), VMware has made a strong entry into the VIOM market.

In short, VMware is not only the virtualization platform leader, but a key management innovator. VCOps is a bold move, and in our view customers will benefit from evaluating it in the context of both existing and emerging competitive solutions.

The Competitive Landscape In our view, the current VIOM marketplace, where VMware is targeting the VCOps suite, consists of three primary competitive vendor categories. These categories are informational and directional on-ly, and include Taneja Group opinion:

Virtual infrastructure monitoring and capacity management tools. These solutions were typically originally designed to fill a need for better visibility, analysis, and reporting of the metrics generated by VMware’s vCenter Server, and to assist with basic capacity planning for virtual or physical environments. None of the solutions in this category offers self-learning, predictive analytics. Vendors include Quest, Solarwinds, VKernel, Veeam, and Cirba.

Performance analytics and network monitoring tools: Vendors here offer general-purpose, advanced performance analytics engines (BMC, Netuitive), a performance data warehouse (Zenoss), or network performance monitoring tools (Xangati, CA). Each vendor in this category excels at processing one or more dimensions of performance data. With the ex-ception of BMC and CA, these vendors don’t claim to offer end-to-end operations management features.

Enterprise management systems (EMS): The large EMS vendors (CA and BMC were chosen for this study) have very broad and feature-rich management frameworks and large installed-bases, but have been slower to enhance or target their solutions specifically for the virtual in-frastructure. Solutions here are more expensive and require greater services investments than the other competitive solutions reviewed.

Recommendations for IT and Business Leaders Your mileage from VIOM solutions will vary, and we encourage IT and business buyers to narrow the scope of competitive analysis to a smaller number of vendors in order to simplify head-to-head func-tional comparisons. As you do so, keep these recommendations in mind:

Plan to put your virtual infrastructure on auto-pilot. Think beyond the traditional “cock-pit”-style of operations management, in which raw data is presented to the admin, who must decide what’s important and what to do about it. Leverage predictive analytics to go beyond simple infrastructure monitoring to proactive performance management.

Virtualization domain expertise matters. Business-critical virtualization demands availa-bility, performance, capacity, and configuration tools that understand the unique characteris-tics of virtual workloads. Insist on out-of-the-box capabilities for the virtual infrastructure, and avoid repurposing tools built for legacy data center architectures.

Validate vendor claims in your environment. The VIOM market is still emerging, and hype continues to lead reality. Invest in real-world testing of automated performance analytics as well as automated operations workflows, to establish a clear understanding of how each will add measurable value to your current IT infrastructure and processes.


VIOM Market Profile

VIRTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT: DRIVERS AND REQUIREMENTS

Why Explore Virtual Infrastructure Operations Management? Four years ago, Taneja Group began tracking the emerging class of solutions designed to simplify management and optimization of virtual infrastructures. Our focus then was on solutions that helped customers virtualize more workloads, faster, and with more confidence. At that time, the primary drivers for virtualization were capital and operating expense (CapEx & OpEx) savings through work-load consolidation, mobility, and higher availability.

Soon, we expect nearly half of all enterprise workloads to be virtualized. This means that the “low-hanging fruit”—the less-critical workloads—have already been virtualized, and many enterprises are now virtualizing business-critical, Tier-1 applications. These applications demand much greater op-erational oversight and control, and generate a host of performance metrics from across the physical and virtual IT stack. Collecting and processing all of these metrics quickly becomes overwhelming for any human to manage manually, leading first to a data problem (Figure 2). And, this in turn demands more from VMware administrators: much faster and more automated performance troubleshooting, diagnosis, planning, and remediation—in short, an operations problem.

The goal must now be to solve both of these problems through automation: automated data analysis to pinpoint the sources of performance problems sooner, and automated operations to fix them faster (Figure 3). Taneja Group tracks solutions that address these problems under the Virtual Infrastruc-ture Operations Management (VIOM) umbrella, indicating the rising importance of end-to-end in-frastructure performance and operations management for business-critical virtualized workloads.

In sum, business-critical virtualization requires greater operations maturity. And, as virtualization is an essential enabling technology for cloud computing (both private and public), companies must es-tablish rock-solid VIOM capabilities before they can hope to efficiently manage critical workloads running in the cloud.

Figure 2: Dynamic and growing virtual environments generate large amounts of performance data, which is typically analyzed and processed manually via multiple management tools, interfaces, and scripts.



VIOM Market Profile

Figure 3: The goal of virtual infrastructure operations management solutions: automation of performance data collection and analysis, plus automation of the operations management lifecycle.


How the Virtual Infrastructure is Different Virtualization breaks most of our tried-and-true IT performance and operations management strate-gies. And performance is a key word here: managing top-tier applications is much less about consoli-dation or availability monitoring and much more about overall performance, including reliability and availability.

Performance management is not a new discipline, but virtualization creates a new infrastructure lay-er from which to monitor, predict, and optimize it. VIOM demands a new vantage point from which to analyze performance. Instead of bottom-up (traditional stove-piped resource/element management) or top-down (traditional APM, or application performance management), VIOM requires a "middle-out," more holistic, infrastructure-level approach.

Why? Because virtualization has significantly changed how we manage performance, in several ways that are hardly controversial:

Scale overwhelms processes: There are now too many moving parts to size, adjust, relocate and monitor without significant automation. This means automation of the process of identi-fying anomalies and filtering out the noisy alerts from the important ones.

Abstraction obscures visibility: Virtual workloads connect to resources and to each other dynamically and transiently. This means that performance must now be based on a real-time view of topology, discovered as needed, and metrics must be correlated across all the ele-ments that make up an application at any given moment.

Boundaries break down: Virtual machines aren't just applications, servers, network devices, or disk sectors, but a new amalgam of all of these, straining the traditional IT separation of duties. The VM needs a performance view that understands this.


VIOM Market Profile

Mobility creates complexity: Before we can hope to diagnose a performance problem, we have to know where each resource is, and why it moved. Performance management tools must track these mobility events and correlate them to performance problems.

In the virtual infrastructure, change is the only constant. It's not very useful, now, to measure how many IOPS a particular array can deliver, or the CPU utilization on a single vSphere host, or the bandwidth utilized on one vSwitch, etc., as independent data points. They each change too often, and none provides enough information to understand how the broader virtual infrastructure is respond-ing to load.

Customers Need Better Tools to Automate Virtual Operations Performance management tools have historically been designed with particular IT jobs in mind: ap-plication managers, storage and server admins, NOC staff, and, most recently, VMware administra-tors, to name a few. In contrast, VIOM requires us to build for cross-domain administrative and oper-ations teams. These IT pros need to understand and synthesize data across multiple infrastructure tiers (most of which are or will soon be virtualized), analyze and plan, and adjust resource allocations in real-time to maintain performance. With this end-goal in mind, it’s increasingly important that VIOM solutions be designed to not only deliver tangible benefits for the virtual infrastructure out of the box, but also to be extensible to the broader IT infrastructure in the future.

EVALUATING COMPETITIVE SOLUTIONS

We evaluated VCOps relative to ten competing management vendor solutions. To organize our analy-sis, we established two primary features categories: technology platform and operations manage-ment.

Within each of these categories, we then established three feature groups, and developed evaluation factors for each (for methodology, vendor selection criteria and evaluation factors, see Appendix A).

At a high level, we sought answers to the following questions from each vendor:

TECHNOLOGY PLATFORM FEATURES

Monitoring: How and how often are performance, capacity and configuration metrics gath-ered, and from which sources throughout the datacenter?

Analytics: How are metrics correlated, analyzed, and interpreted? How are important events distinguished from normal behavior?

Visualization: How are raw and derived performance metrics presented? How is the user in-terface organized (graphics, dashboards, top-N lists, charts, report views, etc.)?

OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT FEATURES

Diagnosis: How is troubleshooting and analysis simplified and accelerated? How is root-cause analysis performed? How are alert thresholds defined?

Planning: How is capacity planning supported? How are utilization trends spotted and how is what-if analysis implemented? What capacity reporting is available?

Remediation: Are remediation actions suggested? Is any form of automatic remediation sup-ported, and if so, how? Is configuration and compliance management included?

In addition to these factors, we also reviewed each vendor’s focus on and proven capabilities for management of highly virtualized infrastructures, solution packaging and pricing options, and overall product and solution maturity.


VIOM Market Profile

Vendors and Solutions Evaluated

Vendor Solution(s) Evaluated

VMware vCenter Operations (Standard, Advanced, Enterprise editions)

Quest vFoglight

Solarwinds Virtualization Manager

VKernel vOperations (Performance Analyzer, Capacity Mgr, Optimizer, Reporting & Chargeback)

Veeam Veeam One (Monitor, Reporter, Business View)

Netuitive Netuitive Behavioral Learning Engine

Zenoss Service Dynamics

Xangati VI Dashboard, VDI Dashboard

Cirba Data Center Intelligence

CA Technologies Virtual Assurance

BMC Software ProactiveNet Performance Management, BMC Capacity Management

Note: we included BMC and CA, two of the “big 4” enterprise management systems vendors, because they have fo-cused strongly on crafting solutions targeted specifically at VMware virtual infrastructures and compete more di-rectly in the VMware management space than IBM or HP. We also excluded IBM and HP to limit project scope.

FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS

The current VIOM competitive landscape includes vendors with varying degrees of virtual infrastruc-ture expertise, offering products from multiple traditional IT management disciplines. To simplify comparisons with the various editions of VCOps, we have organized competitive solutions into three categories: virtual infrastructure monitoring and capacity management tools, performance analytics and network monitoring tools, and enterprise management systems.

Within each of these groupings, viable VIOM solutions do exist today, and we encourage readers to use this market overview as a starting point for more detailed investigations based on your IT envi-ronment and requirements.

Additional vendor information and analysis is included in Appendix B.

Virtual Infrastructure Monitoring and Capacity Management Tools

All of the competitive solutions here (except Cirba) were built specifically to add value to the vSphere metrics collected by vCenter. As such, these solutions are primarily aimed at improving visibility and manual analysis of existing performance metrics—no predictive analytics are employed to signifi-cantly reduce the volume of alerts and alarms that administrators need to manage. Quest and Solar-winds are leaders here, with VKernel and Veeam also in the running. All four vendors offer capacity planning and modeling, with Quest leading the pack in terms of solution breadth and maturity.

Quest stands out for including a workflow designer for automated remediation of performance prob-lems, while Solarwinds stands out for its focus on configuration management. These enhancements, beyond basic monitoring and reporting, are laudable. But neither of these leaders can match the ana-lytics capabilities at the heart of VCOps—in this sense, VCOps is a game-changer for smaller environ-ments. Cirba is an outlier, with rich capacity planning for migrations and technology refreshes, but offering no run-time operations capabilities.


VIOM Market Profile

VMWARE VCOPS STANDARD AND ADVANCED

VCOps Standard and Advanced are automated operations management solutions that integrate per-formance and capacity data and management operations for VMware-virtualized infrastructures. VCOps Standard edition includes all vSphere metrics, analytics, health models, and an operations GUI, for VMware installations of up to 1500 VMs. The Advanced edition adds capacity planning by bun-dling VMware’s vCenter CapacityIQ product, and is well-suited for small to medium-sized and grow-ing environments.

Both editions include:

Patented self-learning performance analytics: VCOps collects over 250 metrics for every single object via the vCenter API (the largest set of metrics in our survey), providing a rich da-ta set of utilization, capacity and configuration data. The analytics engine automatically estab-lishes “normal” behavior baselines through self-learning mathematics, sets up dynamic thresholds (“smart alerts”), and then tracks how performance data is trending relative to the-se baselines. VCOps also calculates and presents high-level health, workload, and utilization scores—this can dramatically reduce the amount of data the operations team must sort through themselves in order to identify current or emerging performance problems.

Graphically-rich performance dashboard: A next-generation graphically-rich GUI presents health scores at any level in the infrastructure, allowing for rapid drill-down into underlying root causes quickly. Dashboards, which are customizable, gather a broad array of data on a single screen, organized in an intuitive, easy-to-navigate structure. Problem resources are shown in relation to their parents, peers, and children, making root-cause and impact analysis faster and more accurate.

Capacity planning designed for virtual infrastructures: VCOps’ CapacityIQ module sup-ports capacity analysis, forecasting and planning for virtual resources, including available ca-pacity, in-use, needed, and time-to-full. Dashboards provide at-a-glance charts and graphs for rapid analysis; customizable rules and alerts provide automated notification of threshold breaches. On-going capacity optimization is supported via a complete set of detailed reports including recommendations for right-sizing or decommissioning. Interactive what-if modeling allows multiple scenarios to be tested easily and as required.

QUEST VFOGLIGHT

VFoglight uses widgets, charts, and graphic overlays effectively to present a broad range of perfor-mance metrics, but includes no predictive, self-learning, or other mathematical analysis to spot emerging performance problems outside predefined thresholds. vFoglight includes capacity planning features, but falls short of CapacityIQ when it comes to optimizing VM density (CapacityIQ more accu-rately determines “available capacity” by taking into account the impact of reservations for High Availability, for example). vFoglight does include extensive remediation capabilities via an included Workflow Studio and 50 predefined Action Packs, which are designed specifically to automatically resize and/or reconfigure the virtual infrastructure in response to an alarm or alert. No compliance management is included in vFoglight (Quest’s Foglight offers compliance management).

In sum, vFoglight excels at supporting VMware admins in the way they work today: flooded with met-rics, the admin sets thresholds and alerts, identifies problems, and can automatically fix many of them. At scale, this approach can become operationally overwhelming, so we expect Quest customers to request enhanced performance analytics as the VMware environments they support (and the met-rics they must monitor) continue to grow.


VIOM Market Profile

SOLARWINDS VIRTUALIZATION MANAGER

Virtualization Manager stands out for two reasons: a unique search-based interface to performance data, and a focus on configuration management. Virtualization Manager is a monitoring solution, not a performance management platform, lacking any predictive performance root-cause or impact analyt-ics. Raw and correlated metrics are presented to the admin in an attractive and highly customizable widget-based dashboard, but alerts are static (prepackaged and customizable). Solarwinds stresses community in Virtualization Manager, and encourages users to share useful alerts and queries with other admins. No predictive analytics are provided.

Virtualization Manager is essentially a search-driven dashboard for analysis of vCenter metrics, with configuration and storage visibility that help it stand out from the other VMware monitors we re-viewed. We like the search-driven interface, but relying solely on search limits the product’s chances of evolving to be a more complete operations management platform.

VKERNEL VOPERATIONS SUITE

VKernel is a vCenter monitor and capacity planning tool, and lacks any behavioral or predictive per-formance analytics. No configuration or compliance management features are included. A relatively small set of vCenter metrics are collected and presented in very simple charts and report views; from these, the admin can investigate performance problems. Alerting relies on vCenter alarms primarily, but users can also set thresholds and run trend analysis manually to identify emerging problems. The recently-released Performance Analyzer has a simplistic GUI, relying on Excel-style sheet views and a navigation tree that echoes vCenter.

VEEAM ONE

Veeam One is not a performance management solution, nor is it sold as one. The product offers very basic and limited vSphere monitoring features, and no performance visibility beyond simple correla-tions. No performance analytics are provided, and capacity trending is rudimentary. No configuration or compliance management is provided. In our view, Veeam One is essentially a charting, reporting and documentation tool for VMware environments that have no other tools except vCenter. Indeed, Veeam calls the product a “better vCenter than vCenter,” which is appropriate, and we expect to see little uptake outside of the SMB market.

CIRBA DATA CENTER INTELLIGENCE

Cirba’s Data Center Intelligence is essentially a data warehouse and data mining solution for large-scale IT migration and refresh projects. As such, it is not a VIOM solution as we’ve defined it: it lacks run-time performance monitoring, alerting, or analytics designed to identify performance impact or root causes. It has no run-time operations dashboard. Its capacity optimization and configuration fea-tures are limited to what-if analysis for planning purposes, and in our view are primarily suited only to planning for large-scale technology refreshes, migrations, or cloud deployments. Cirba offers no configuration management or compliance features beyond business rules that govern where in a physical infrastructure virtual workloads can and should be placed.

Performance Analytics and Network Monitoring Tools

These solutions compete with the analytics engine at the heart of all VCOps editions. BMC Proactive-Net and Netuitive are the leading competitors to VCOps, yet neither have the virtual infrastructure intelligence VMware brings to the table. As a result, we expect that VCOps will do a better job at iden-tifying emerging performance problems sooner in dynamic vSphere environments, but we encourage customers to run proofs of concept with real-world data to validate this claim.


VIOM Market Profile

Zenoss offers a commercial open-source performance data “warehouse,” well-suited for trouble-shooting performance problems after they occur, but is not sold as a complete operations platform for virtual infrastructures. Xangati and CA (Virtual Assurance) are both network monitors and per-formance analyzers. For network-sensitive applications (such as virtual desktop environments or particularly latency-sensitive applications), both might play a role as effective add-ons to a broader VIOM platform solution.

VMWARE VCOPS (ALL EDITIONS)

The core of all VCOps editions is technology from VMware’s acquisition of Integrien in 2010. VMware has augmented Integrien’s self-learning analytics with additional vSphere metrics, best practices, and in-depth vSphere operational knowledge to create industry-first, virtualization-specific infrastructure health models for VMware infrastructure.

NETUITIVE

Netuitive is the strongest of the general-purpose event correlation and analysis (ECA) engines we re-viewed, but as with the other ECA-only solutions, is not a standalone VIPM solution. Netuitive does include predictive performance analysis, based on a patented behavioral learning engine and multi-variate regression analysis. For VMware operations teams, Netuitive lags VMware in the domain-specific knowledge contained in VCOps. VCOps combines behavioral learning via mathematical analy-sis plus expert knowledge of hundreds of vCenter metrics; together, these yield the VCOps health model, which identifies important patterns emerging in vCenter metrics. In other words, Netuitive’s pure-math approach might be comparable VCOps, but VCOps brings more domain knowledge to bear on whether a performance anomaly is important at a given time to a VMware operations team. Netui-tive is not a VIPM platform as we have defined it (nor is it sold as one), lacking capacity planning, con-figuration or compliance remediation.

BMC PROACTIVENET & CAPACITY MANAGEMENT

We did not identify any strongly differentiating features in ProactiveNet or Capacity Management that clearly place them ahead of or behind VCOps. That said, ProactiveNet offered the most feature-rich self-learning analytics engine of the VCOps competitors we reviewed. Customers evaluating BMC relative to VCOps in terms of predictive analytics are encouraged to pilot both in a real-world situa-tion. Neptuny’s Caplan product (which became part of the broader BMC Capacity Management suite) had very limited uptake before it was acquired, and the company’s revenue was heavily services-weighted, leading us to believe that significant integration work still needs to be done by BMC to ex-pose the Caplan functionality in Capacity Management.

XANGATI VI & VDI DASHBOARDS

Xangati provides a very narrowly-focused view of virtual infrastructure performance, based on deep-packet inspection and impact analysis. The vCenter metrics included in Xangati’s performance dash-boards are minimal (CPU, disk, memory, etc.), so it will not identify emerging problems deep in the infrastructure; its strength lies in user response-time monitoring and troubleshooting. Xangati does provide self-learning analytics, but in a traditional ECA sense: the goal is to solve network perfor-mance problems. The live performance charts, again, are suited to NOC-style operations—they are of less value in the general case of VIOM. Xangati focuses on use cases that show off its differentiators, primarily VDI deployments where display protocol performance and user response times are the crit-ical measures of performance. No capacity or configuration management features are offered. Xangati is a low-cost add-on for specific use cases, in our view.


VIOM Market Profile

CA VIRTUAL ASSURANCE

CA offers a broad set of IT management bundles that address all major IT management disciplines. Since mid-2010, CA has attempted to package some of its component modules specifically for virtual infrastructure, in order to appeal directly to virtualization managers and administrators, but in our view the vendor still has considerable work to do. Virtual Assurance is an adequate event correlation and analysis engine, based primarily on identifying problems based on user/service response-time degradation, but it does not provide predictive performance analytics for early warning of perfor-mance problems within the virtual infrastructure itself.

ZENOSS

Zenoss provides a general-purpose, commercial open source monitoring and data analysis tool, but does not provide predictive performance analysis via advanced algorithms or deep visibility into the virtual infrastructure. The “data warehouse” supports performance data mining after the fact, but does not provide early notification of problems based on self-learning analytics. Alert storms are re-duced via filtering, but all intelligence is contained in policies, which must be defined by the user in advance. While there is a large community of admins providing open-source adapters and policies, Zenoss is dependent on them to increase the value of their product in enterprise environments. As a VIOM platform, Zenoss falls short due to lack of any virtual infrastructure-focused capacity planning, configuration management, or compliance remediation. In our view, Zenoss is suited as an add-on performance analysis tool only, and could possibly be deployed as a data source for VCOps as op-posed to a competitive platform.

Enterprise Management Systems For the larger customer, VCOps Enterprise brings together predictive analytics (to spot emerging per-formance and capacity problems sooner), powerful visualization and reporting (to diagnose these problems faster), capacity planning (to avoid problems earlier), and configuration/compliance man-agement (to repair problems automatically). We are impressed by this solution combination, though there is still some integration work to be done to unify the various performance, capacity and config-uration interfaces and workflows.

VCOps Enterprise competes most directly with EMS solution suites from the “big 4” management vendors, including BMC and CA. Whereas BMC and CA have established and proven solutions for physical infrastructure operations management, they have been late to the game for virtual infra-structure operations management. VMware will need to build out the VCOps data model to compete effectively in the physical world, while CA and BMC must do the same in reverse.

VCOPS ENTERPRISE

The Enterprise edition adds configuration management and compliance control to the Advanced edi-tion by bundling VMware’s vCenter Configuration Manager product. VCOps’ Configuration Manager module includes policy-driven configuration and compliance management built for the virtual infra-structure. Features include automated collection of configuration data, detection and automatic re-mediation of problems and security vulnerabilities, and patch management. Configuration Manager also provides vSphere, OS and software provisioning; ships with packaged best practices, hardening, and industry compliance policies out of the box; and includes a range of role-based dashboards.

The Enterprise edition is well-suited for larger, rapidly-changing or growing environments, and for compliance-sensitive industry verticals. VCOps Enterprise also enables collection of metrics from ad-ditional data sources such as physical devices and other monitoring frameworks, further enriching the VCOps health model.


VIOM Market Profile

CA TECHNOLOGIES

CA Virtual Configuration competes favorably with the vCenter Configuration Manager component of VCOps Enterprise; a deeper competitive analysis will require testing each product against a specific set of customer requirements, however. CA is still struggling to shed its image as a mainframe tools supplier to legacy customers, which can put it in a defensive position in sales situations. CA offers a bewildering array of IT management tool suites, which can make it difficult for prospective users to evaluate and understand which solution works best. Since many of the CA management products have not yet been adapted for virtual environments, a new customer deployment can require a signif-icant investment in professional services to actually implement.

BMC SOFTWARE

BMC draws on its considerable experience in business service management for large enterprises as it adds virtualization-targeted features to its solution portfolio. BMC does not have an identifiable product strategy focused on virtualization. Instead, the company is working to adapt many of its oth-er management tools to virtualization, as they were not originally built for this purpose. While the company attempts to sell these physical infrastructure management solutions into virtualized envi-ronments today, the deployment often requires a considerable professional services investment on the part of the customer to successfully implement. In addition, BMC lags VCOps significantly when it comes to configuration management for virtual machines, lacking automated remediation and com-pliance templates built for virtualized servers. Finally, a medium-to-large installation of BMC Proac-tiveNet Enterprise plus one companion offering can cost a customer in the mid-six figures for product licenses, and often another six-figure investment in professional services.

THIS REPORT WAS SPONSORED BY VMWARE

ABOUT TANEJA GROUP

Taneja Group’s mission is to deliver best-in-class technology analysis and consulting for the storage, serv-er, virtualization and cloud markets to enable our clients to convert technology into business. We are a boutique firm of operational experts with both broad and deep expertise in storage systems and technolo-gies, server and desktop hardware and software, virtualization platforms and appliances, cloud software and services, and physical and virtual infrastructure management solutions. For more information, please visit www.tanejagroup.com.

NOTICE: THE INFORMATION CONTAINED HEREIN HAS BEEN OBTAINED FROM SOURCES BELIEVED TO BE ACCURATE AND RELIABLE, AND INCLUDES PERSONAL OPINIONS THAT ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE. TANEJA GROUP DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES AS TO THE ACCURACY OF SUCH INFORMATION AND ASSUMES NO RESPONSIBILITY OR LIABILITY FOR ERRORS OR FOR YOUR USE OF, OR RELIANCE UPON, SUCH INFORMATION. COMPANY, BRAND AND PRODUCT NAMES REFERENCED HEREIN MAY BE TRADEMARKS OF THEIR RESPECTIVE OWNERS.

http://www.tanejagroup.com/


VIOM Market Profile

APPENDIX A: METHODOLOGY AND EVALUATION FACTORS

EVALUATION METHODOLOGY

Taneja Group performed independent research in May-July 2011, augmenting our experience with and knowledge of vendor solutions with additional briefings and, where possible, demos and inter-views. For each comparative solution category, we established a set of evaluation factors based on the features offered by VMware and our opinion of the importance of each to the enterprise buyer inter-ested in virtual infrastructure operations management (VIOM) solutions.

VENDOR SELECTION CRITERIA

VIOM, as an emerging solution category, draws vendors from many existing IT management disci-plines (virtual and physical infrastructure monitoring, event correlation and analytics, capacity plan-ning, and enterprise systems management vendors, to name the most common). We chose vendors who represent a good cross-section of these categories, are currently shipping administrative and operations management solutions for VMware environments, and are mentioned frequently in our customer discussions and vendor briefings.

EVALUATION FACTORS

Technology Platform Features

Feature Group Evaluation Factors

Monitoring Data sources (vCenter, guest, host, cluster; physical host, network, storage); type of metrics collected and breadth; collection methods supported; collection frequency; adapters shipped; adapter interfaces

Analytics Type of database(s) utilized; baseline (normal) determination (self-learning, packaged, thresholds, user-defined, best practices); KPI establishment; KPI correlations; derived health scores (metrics included); historical performance data retention; search capabilities; impact and root-cause analysis support.

Visualization Current performance display (dashboards, widgets, sorted lists, top-N views, heat maps, topology maps, score badges, traffic light, charts, graphs); integration of multiple element types; expansion & drilldown; GUI density; navigation styles. Root-cause investigation; troubleshooting; exploration.

Performance Management Capabilities


Diagnosis Troubleshooting workflows; root-cause determination; impact analysis; integration of capacity and con-figuration data; alerting (user-defined; user-customizable; thresholds; overrides); configuration event tracking; correlation and overlay displays; search and historical analysis.

Planning Capacity planning support (dashboards, capacity thresholds and alerts; optimization; profiling; reserved capacity); what-if scenario modeling; forecasting and trending; reports (canned, customizable, role-based).

Remediation Configuration data sources and collection methods; configuration event visibility; policy creation and maintenance; third-party best practices and compliance templates; provisioning; patch support; AD com-pliance; role-based controls.


VIOM Market Profile

SCORING KEY

We established a 5-point scoring system for each factor, where 0 = no capability and 4 = a feature-rich, innovative and/or mature solution. Representative criteria:

Technology Platform Features


Monitoring 1 = basic metrics sourced from vCenter

2 = deeper metrics sourced from vCenter

3 = metrics sourced from vCenter and some physical infrastructure

4 = broad and deep metrics sourced from vCenter and physical infrastructure

Analytics 1 = metric monitoring and collection only; limited correlation

2 = adequate metrics correlation/trending

3 = advanced analytics, self-learning behavioral performance modeling

4 = advanced, self-learning analytics plus vSphere-specific health models

Visualization 1 = basic metric views (sorted lists, top-N)

2 = correlated views/charts/graphs, good use of color/charts/navigation

3 = advanced navigation/charts/graphs; multi-dimensional dashboards

4 = rich, dense multi-dimensional dashboards, advanced navigation

Operations Management Features


Diagnosis 1 = basic performance visibility; limited diagnostic support

2 = adequate, maturing diagnostic and troubleshooting features

3 = advanced diagnostic and troubleshooting features

4 = leading diagnostic and troubleshooting features

Planning 1 = capacity visibility only

2 = adequate capacity planning and modeling features

3 = advanced capacity planning and modeling features

4 = leading capacity planning and modeling features

Remediation 1 = configuration/change visibility only

2 = some integration with configuration lifecycle operations

3 = broad configuration management features

4 = full-cycle configuration management plus continuous compliance


VIOM Market Profile

APPENDIX B: COMPETITIVE VENDOR INFORMATION

QUEST SOFTWARE

Vizioncore originally developed vFoglight 4 years ago and has been shipping the product since 2008; Quest acquired Vizioncore in 2008. Quest claims 6500 customers of vFoglight worldwide (Quest has over 100,000 customers across product lines). Deployment is either standalone or integrated within a Foglight installation as a “cartridge.” vFoglight is delivered as a Windows/Linux/Solaris app, priced at $799 per socket managed (entry price for SE edition). Quest also offers bundled price discounts on the vFoglight Pro edition when purchased with vFoglight Storage, vOptimizer Pro, and/or Foglight Network Management System (NMS).

Technology Platform Resource and availability metrics are collected every 2 minutes via vCenter API (and Hyper-V via WMI) and averaged hourly, with raw data retained indefinitely for historical performance queries. Metrics are collected in an embedded or external SQL database. Abnormal performance is identified via 60+ pre-packaged alarms, based on historical trending and thresholds, which are static, pre-defined, and user-customizable.

The performance GUI is rich and utilizes graphics, charts, and animation effectively, but does not pro-vide higher-order calculated health scores to reduce the amount of data an operator must manage. Widget-based dashboards are customizable via drag-and-drop. Home dashboards are pre-built and roll up CPU, network, memory and disk utilization at the vCenter, datacenter, cluster, host, resource pool, datastore, and VM level.

Operations Management Historical performance diagnosis is supported by selecting calendar ranges, which then apply to all widget displays on screen and across tabs. Any widget displaying historic performance metrics can be exported and shared across teams as PDF or Excel. Capacity planning features include right-sizing dashboards and trend analysis over any time horizon. Capacity modeling and what-if analysis is also included.

The most recent vFoglight version (6.5) included new support for Microsoft Hyper-V and automated remediation features. Any type of script (PowerShell being the most common) can be attached to an alarm. The Workflow Studio is also included for designing custom workflows, with 50 different “Ac-tion Packs” predefined for VMware environments. Workflows integrate with BMC Remedy for help desk process automation.

SOLARWINDS

Hyper9, founded in 2007, began shipping its Virtualization Optimization Suite in 2008. The company was acquired by Solarwinds in early 2011 and the product was renamed Virtualization Manager. Vir-tualization Manager is packaged as a single virtual appliance. Pricing is per-powered-on virtual ma-chines, starting at $2995 for 50 VMs.

Technology Platform Virtualization Manager collects configuration, performance and state information from vCenter, from unmanaged ESX/ESXi hosts, and from guests directly via WMI. Collection interval defaults to 10 min for performance and state data and 12 hours for configuration data (adjustable). Correlated raw per-formance data (for VMs, hosts, datastores, clusters, and applications) is retained as long as config-ured, and averaged into hourly rollups. No additional analytics beyond simple correlations are pro-


VIOM Market Profile

vided. A proprietary database in the virtual appliance is accessed solely via a search interface. The GUI ships with 20+ preconfigured dashboards made up of a set of Flex widgets (alert monitor, con-sumption, content, fitment, notes, Top N, trend, etc.). Each widget displays ranked results of a query.

Operations Management Virtualization Manager ships with 40+ pre-packaged alerts to identify and highlight common prob-lems in virtual infrastructures. Alerts can be modified and new alerts created on any resource set via a custom query. Performance chart widgets can overlay any set of metrics for visual correlation. Ca-pacity planning is via a collection of widgets that model resource containers and resource profiles; historic queries establish container utilization trends and predict capacity events (time to full, room for additional, what-if, N-1 analysis, etc.) given resources of a certain profile.

Basic consumption widgets graph remaining virtualization resources based on default usage profiles and container settings for CPU, IOPS, Memory, Network, and Space. Configuration data for any VM, guest OS, or application (if collected) can be compared to a reference standard, to the VM itself over time. A recent enhancement is called Time Travel, which maps dependencies between VMs, hosts, datastores, clusters, and vApps visually and historically for forensic analysis. Remediation is not a focus of Virtualization Manager, but scripts can be tied to an alert.

VKERNEL

VKernel was founded and began shipping virtual infrastructure (VI) performance and capacity man-agement software in 2007. In Spring of 2011, VKernel repackaged its solutions into a single VKernel vOperations Suite (called vOPS), including four preexisting products: Performance Analyzer, Capacity Manager, Optimizer, and Reporting & Chargeback. vOPS is delivered as a single virtual appliance (289MB) containing all four products; 30-day trials are available for each. Several free VM tools are offered as well. vOPS is priced per socket and per module: 1 module for $299, 2 for $499, 3 for $599, all 4 for $649. VKernel claims 700 customers.

Technology Platform vOPS has a single data collection point, the vCenter API, from which it collects metrics (70-80) and vCenter alerts. Metrics are collected every 30 minutes by default and vCenter is scanned for new alarms every 2 minutes. Analytics are provided via the underlying Capacity Analytics Engine, which has been extended for Performance Analyzer to include “abnormal trends, root cause, and impact analysis.” These terms are used liberally by VKernel, but the product includes no event correlation or analysis analytics, no predictive performance algorithms, and limited impact analysis. The data model does include recommendations for resolution (hot-add memory to a VM, for example).

Operations Management VKernel does filter vCenter alerts to identify root cause—the underlying VM metrics of most inter-est—reducing what the vendor calls “alert storms” and presenting a short description and recom-mendation for remediation, if available. Performance impact analysis screens present metric and alarm histories alongside lists of impacted VMs and datastores. Trend alarms can be configured man-ually, but are based on user-defined thresholds, not on any algorithms provided by VKernel.

Capacity planning is the most mature capability in the VKernel suite. Enhanced capacity availability maps and reservations management have recently been added and compete favorably with the Ca-pacityIQ component of VCOps. A limited set of remediation suggestions (based on VKernel-defined best practices) can be executed via the vCenter API with a single click from the Performance Analyzer interface.


VIOM Market Profile

VEEAM

Veeam was founded in 2006 and is best known for its popular Backup & Replication product for VMware. Veeam acquired nworks in 2008, gaining management packs/plugins that provide VMware metrics to Microsoft System Center and HP Operations Manager. Veeam ONE is a VMware monitoring and reporting suite that includes three bundled products: Monitor, Reporter, Business View. Veeam claims 25,000 customers (adding 700+ per month), of which between 4000 and 5000 have bought Veeam ONE (roughly 20% of total). Pricing is per socket.

Technology Platform Veeam Monitor is a Windows application deployed against an SQL database; the Reporter module is an MS SQL Reporting Services app installed separately. All metrics are collected via vCenter APIs. Veeam claims to monitor elements vCenter doesn’t (“snapshot size,” for example), and supports 100+ new vSphere 4.1 performance metrics in Monitor 5.0. No advanced analytics or health scores are in-cluded. A full suite of management dashboards and performance charts are included, driven by 125 pre-defined alarms and thresholds defined in the Monitor knowledge base (predefined by Veeam “based on years of customer feedback”) and including possible causes of each alarm, suggested reso-lution, and links to external documentation.

Operations Management Veeam One is not a performance diagnosis/troubleshooting, capacity optimization, or configura-tion/compliance solution. Veeam focuses on monitoring and visibility only. Recent enhancements in-clude deeper virtual disk & snapshot monitoring, additional canned metric historical reports (includ-ing business and infrastructure tree views), and the ability to identify configuration events on histori-cal performance charts. Capacity planning is rudimentary, and designed as a starting point for VMware admins who have no other capacity planning tools.

CIRBA

Cirba’s Data Center Intelligence (DCI) is an analytics software package that seeks to optimize re-source utilization through efficient placement of application workloads on physical and virtual infra-structures. Founded in 1999, Cirba has focused on the virtualization market since 2007. The DCI solu-tion is sold primarily through systems integrators and used to support datacenter transformation planning initiatives, but is also available direct from Cirba. The vendor claims 200+ customers and prices per engagement. Most recently, Cirba has focused on helping large customers plan for cloud migration projects

Technology Platform DCI collects configuration data from physical and virtual infrastructure, via one-time or automated imports, in order to populate a policy-based rules engine. This repository is described as being analo-gous to a business intelligence data warehouse for IT planning. Sources of configuration data and re-source utilization can include vCenter, a CMDB, management platforms (Tivoli, OpenView, BMC), or manual import.

Existing technology and/or business policies governing workload placement and constraints, if avail-able, can also be imported, or users can leverage 90 prepackaged rule sets covering most major serv-er and virtualization platforms. Policy rules describe what systems can run together, and what sys-tems should run together. DCI then applies proprietary contention probability and other algorithms to determine the most efficient placement of workloads across physical and virtual infrastructure to maximize consolidation ratios and utilization rates within business constraints.


VIOM Market Profile

Operations Management The primary interface to Cirba is via reports and dashboards recommending optimal placement of workloads across various resources, in a color-coded heatmap-style matrix. The heatmap indicates workloads that should be moved, servers that can be further consolidated, etc., depending on the en-vironment and the types of business rules that have been implemented (physical location and securi-ty constraints, for example).

Historical utilization data can also be fed into Cirba to further strengthen the model with capacity trending (CPU, memory). Cirba does not consider the DCI solution “capacity planning” as the term is typically used by server administrators, because they do not stress VM or host capacity manage-ment—the focus is on the most efficient placement of workloads.

NETUITIVE

Netuitive was originally founded in the 1990s, and in 2002 incorporated in its current form. Its pre-dictive analytics technology has been applied specifically to performance management of virtual in-frastructures since 2007. Netuitive claims 40 enterprise customers & 270+ OEM customers, including 8 of the top 10 global banks. Netuitive’s solution is built around its patented Behavioral Learning En-gine, based on predictive analytics.

Technology Platform Data is collected at varying frequencies (5-15 minutes, typically) from the vCenter API and dozens of other widely-deployed systems monitoring and management solutions. Netuitive then applies both expert knowledge and statistical techniques (cross-correlation and patented multivariate regression analysis) to determine which metrics best characterize behaviors of managed elements. Best practic-es are packaged as templates, including pre-defined sets of KPIs which the Behavioral Learning En-gine uses to generate health indicators (scores) and trusted alarms. Users can build customized tem-plates.

The state of each managed element is determined through 5 automatically calculated indices: health, capacity, workload, alarm, and availability. An additional performance management database (PMDB) was added in 2010 to support historical queries against the time-series performance data. The PMDB stores the analytical results used by the Netuitive GUI, reports, dashboards and search engine. Netui-tive goes beyond simple linear regression and correlation and has been proven in the market to assist customers in identifying emerging performance problems faster—primarily in financial services.

Operations Management Users interface with Netuitive via a single GUI, which includes performance dashboards, discovery and topology mapping (with CMDB auto-sync), drill-down root-cause diagnosis (including overlays of configuration events, component attributes and related components that are also alarming), trending, alarms, and historical analysis (search and reporting). Netuitive is not sold as a performance man-agement platform in and of itself, but as an add-on analyzer whose alerts and recommendations can feed downstream management platforms such as HP Operations Manager, IBM Tivoli Management, BMC Patrol, Microsoft Operations Manager, NetIQ, and others.

ZENOSS

Zenoss started in 2006 as an open source element management vendor providing an alternative to traditional “Big 4” enterprise systems management frameworks. In 2007 Zenoss released its first “commercial open source” product, Zenoss Enterprise. In March of 2011, Zenoss announced Datacen-ter Insight, which adds unified analytics on top of monitoring data collected from the datacenter in-


VIOM Market Profile

frastructure (physical, virtual, network, storage, and more). The vendor claims 350+ commercial cus-tomers and 100,000 community members, and sells via subscription (platinum, gold, silver offerings).

Technology Platform Zenoss gathers data from both physical and virtual environments and correlates performance and availability metrics. Virtual infrastructure components are automatically categorized and discovered, including VMs, hosts, clusters, and datastores. Zenoss tracks all managed elements in a “real-time service model” – a service topology map from which users can drill down to explore fault details and perform impact analysis. Zenoss Enterprise creates a “central data warehouse” of all collected metrics to support service impact analysis, root cause analysis, and service assurance. Impact policies are de-fined via Policy Gates, which define “normal” behavior baselines from which trend reports and emerging problems can be identified primarily via reports.

Operations Management The primary interface to Zenoss is a performance dashboard based on a service map, which the tool discovers automatically. Zenoss also includes a service designer, where users create new services that can be made up of any mix of web and database servers, physical and virtual infrastructure, storage and network, or other IT resources. Dynamic service views provide real-time discovery of available services and live topology maps, as well as logical and physical mappings between business systems, locations, and people. The service model can also be augmented via manual input, import and export, Web services API, etc.

XANGATI

Xangati was founded in 2006 and originally provided network infrastructure monitoring for telco service providers. Building on a deep network visibility and real-time analytics baseline, Xangati re-packaged the solution as a virtual appliance and rebranded it as VI Dashboard, launched in March 2010. Xangati claims a “couple of hundred” paying customers and thousands of downloads of its free product: a single-ESX/ESXi insight dashboard. Current paid products include Xangati for ESX (for unmanaged ESX hosts), and Xangati VI and VDI Dashboards. Entry pricing for VDI Dashboard is $25/VM for 100 VDI desktops ($2500). Xangati VI Dashboard is priced at $300/socket.

Technology Platform The Xangati virtual appliance collects metrics directly from the vSwitch to allow real-time monitoring of the virtual infrastructure from a network vantage point. 150 network metrics are collected across a range of managed objects, which include VMs, hosts, applications, groups, interfaces, etc. vCenter data is integrated to correlate additional metrics, including VM CPU, memory, and network and storage I/O. A self-learning in-memory analytics engine determines normal behavior (via “flash profiling”), tracks anomalies, and yields an overall health index. Individual metrics by object are displayed in a series of prebuilt widgets in a cockpit-style dashboard view with real-time charts, sorted lists, and a set of top-N reports.

Operations Management Xangati’s dashboards are primarily designed for real-time network-layer VI monitoring and problem detection and do not support virtual infrastructure utilization, capacity planning or remediation. The interface will be familiar to NOC teams. Users can spot anomalies, record data during a problem, and quickly drill down into the VMs that make up a problem application, helping to pinpoint the source. The health index (deviation from normal performance) is primarily a measure of network perfor-mance and lacks insight into the virtual server and storage tiers.


VIOM Market Profile

CA TECHNOLOGIES

CA Virtual is a family of virtual infrastructure management products. For our assessment, the most relevant products are CA Virtual Assurance (performance monitoring, event correlation and root cause analytics), CA Virtual Assurance for Infrastructure Managers (centralized visibility and man-agement), CA Virtual Configuration (policy-based configuration and change compliance manage-ment), and CA Virtual Automation (virtual server provisioning, plus capacity and utilization tracking). CA is also integrating Virtual Assurance with eHealth Performance Manager and the Spectrum Man-agers. Founded in 1976 and one of the “Big 4” systems management vendors, CA is now leveraging its strengths to become a player in the cloud and virtualization management markets. CA’s virtual infra-structure management offerings are primarily sold by CA’s direct sales force. Though CA mostly sells to enterprises on a per-module or per-suite basis, it has also introduced the CA Virtual Foundation Suite, which combines select virtualization management products at a discounted price.

Technology Platform Based on NetQoS technology acquired in 2009, CA Virtual Assurance collects vCenter resource utiliza-tion data via the vCenter APIs, and also collects application-specific infrastructure response time met-rics (derived from deep-packet inspection of all IP traffic) via a virtual collector residing on the vSwitch in each VMware host. Virtual Assurance then correlates these two streams of data to enable virtual administrators to analyze root-cause resource contention issues. The Virtual Assurance con-sole provides real-time views of the physical and virtual network topology, which is continuously up-dated to show infrastructure changes. These views can be extended to encompass physical, virtual and cloud environments with the use of CA Spectrum Automation manager.

CA Virtual Configuration is a standalone configuration management tool for heterogeneous virtual environments. Its discovery capability identifies server and application dependencies, and then in-ventories that data for configuration baselining and validating configurations.

Operations Management CA Virtual Assurance sends threshold-based alerts in the event of response time degradation, and the administrator can then drill down to determine root cause and decide what actions to take. CA Virtual Configuration automatically detects VM configuration drift by comparing configuration changes against stored baselines, and then remediates drift by enforcing configuration policies. The product’s virtualization dashboards facilitate change tracking and review, by first checking compliance for au-dits and then reporting the environment’s status.

Depending on how it is deployed, the add-on CA Spectrum Automation product can dynamically re-mediate problems based on user-specified policies, by automatically responding to changes in re-source utilization, configuration, and application performance across virtual and physical environ-ments.

BMC SOFTWARE

BMC ProactiveNet is a predictive and proactive application performance management solution. The product consists of two components: BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management, and BMC End Us-er Experience Management. The ProactiveNet product suite is integrated and can be used with sev-eral other BMC product suites, including BMC Service Level Management, Atrium Discovery and De-pendency Mapping, and Atrium CMDB. The product also integrates with BMC Capacity Management, based on technology acquired from Neptuny in 2010. BMC Capacity Management is a general-purpose capacity planning and management tool family, and recent Neptuny-based enhancements have extended its capabilities into virtual environments.


VIOM Market Profile

Founded in 1980 and the smallest of the “Big 4” systems management vendors (with revenues just under $2B/year), BMC develops and sells IT service management software to some of the world’s largest companies. BMC is currently leveraging its core strengths in service desk, change and config-uration management, and service automation to enter the markets for virtualization and cloud man-agement. List pricing for BMC ProactiveNet Enterprise and similar BMC suites runs in the mid-six figures, meaning that larger customer installations can cost well over $1 million.

Today, BMC’s virtualization management offerings are largely platform agnostic, enabling them to address the needs of heterogeneous physical/virtual environments in large enterprises, and particu-larly those running multiple hypervisors. BMC has also focused on managing converged infrastruc-ture platforms (e.g. Cisco UCS, VCE Vblock), potentially leading to a “jack of all trades, master of none” situation.

Technology Platform BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management (BPPM) monitors virtualized environments in real time and collects operating and performance metrics from multiple data sources on a continuous, real-time basis. The product leverages insight drawn from BMC’s Performance Management Database (PMDB, based on Neptuny technology) and its own behavioral learning, to determine normal operat-ing levels for a broad range of service components and performance metrics on an ongoing basis. The product can actually predict potential problems before they occur, using built-in analytics.

The BMC End-User Experience Management (BEEM) module captures end-user behavioral infor-mation on an ongoing basis, such as conversion/abandonment rates, time spent per page, completed vs. abandoned transactions, etc. BEEM then correlates this data with BPPM-generated application performance metrics to determine how and when poor application performance might be negatively impacting the end-user experience. We did not evaluate BEEM for this study, as user-experience mon-itoring was outside out scope, but BEEM may be part of a solution suite BMC proposes to virtual in-frastructure operations teams.

BMC Capacity Management collects performance data (without the use of agents) across server, stor-age and network resources, and then stores these in the PMDB. The product has out-of-the-box adapters for third party monitoring tools from BMC, HP, IBM and Microsoft.

Operations Management When BPPM detects deviations from normal operating levels, often across a combination of metrics, it alerts IT operations staff or takes automated action to remediate application performance issues. The product can actually predict potential problems before they occur, using built-in analytics. BPPM au-tomates the prioritization of events, based on predictive service impact analysis, so that IT staff can focus on the most critical problems first. The product can help IT personnel to predict root cause through its continuous capture of deep-dive application diagnostics and behavioral learning capabili-ties.

BMC Capacity Management uses the vast set of collected data in the PMDB to make better informed capacity planning and management decisions. For example, time-forecasting and extrapolation anal-ysis modules are used to predict capacity shortfalls. The product includes modeling or “what if” sce-nario analysis to simulate infrastructure and workload changes, and predict their impact on server, storage and network resource utilization and response times. With the additional of the Neptuny PMDB, BMC Capacity Management has additional virtual capacity metrics to feed capacity modeling, which brings it on par (not beyond) the features of the vCenter CapacityIQ component of VCOps En-terprise.

taneja group report-overview of the virtual infrastructure operations management market

Documents

operations management

operations management

configuration management

management addons

vmware platform

strong viom platform

competitive solution

viom solutions available