Improving Virtual IT Management

As enterprises move toward virtualization, they add yet another layer of complexity to IT systems management. Increasingly, enterprises are looking to manage virtual machines (VMs) and their physical environment together.

Netuitive, which offers tools to manage virtual and physical environments, now offers enterprises the ability to correlate data from both together to get a holistic view of their entire IT infrastructure. It works with a corporation’s existing systems management monitoring tools such as HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli.

Netuitive has two products: Netuitive SI for system level analysis; and Netuitive Service Analyzer, which correlates information from SI for an enterprise-wide view of the IT infrastructure.

Netuitive SI learns the behavior patterns of an enterprise’s monitoring tools, servers, network devices and applications as well as the normal behavior of each VM and its host, Vice President of Marketing Daniel Heimlich told InternetNews.com.

Service Analyzer then cross-correlates this information, between servers, applications, and the end-user experience.

Netuitive SI learns the normal behavior of each VM and host, and embeds that information into the VM, which brings it along when it’s moved to a different host.

Service Analyzer automatically correlates the behavior of each individual VM with the virtual server and with the host, and also provides an overall view of how all the VMs on a physical host interact with it.

That allows fine-grained management. “We understand how the behavior of each virtual machine impacts the host and that helps you understand how you’re utilizing the host,” Heimlich said.

It also provides better system controls. “If a virtual machine takes up excess resources, your typical systems management tools will kick off alerts in every virtual machine,” Heimlich said. “That takes up a lot of network overhead; our system ties the alert to the virtual machine.”

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.