virtualization

CA recently announced an new strategy for optimizing IT services by improving the management of next-generation virtualized data centers and private clouds. CA’s solution for unified business service assurance and automation will involve coupling comprehensive availability and performance management for VMware vSphere 4 environments and Cisco virtualized network switches.

CA is broadening the scope of CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager, CA eHealth Performance Manager and CA Spectrum Automation Manager to encompass in one fully-integrated, end-to-end management solution both physical and virtual server and network environments, as well as databases, voice and unified communications systems, and other networked applications. The products are being enhanced to support VMware vSphere 4 and the Cisco Nexus 1000V distributed virtual software switch, which is an integrated option in VMware vSphere 4. The extensive solution will help enable customers to easily and coherently manage these environments through one user interface and within a powerful unified information model.

CA aims to reduce the complexity of managing fast-growing, dynamic virtual and physical environments by bringing a consistent user experience across end-to-end infrastructure management. Virtualization offers impressive server consolidation-related cost savings, and customers cite the need to reduce management complexities that result from disparate tools and fragmented teams. Moreover, to benefit from hybrid cloud architectures, enterprises and service providers have to enhance network performance visibility in context of server performance.

CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and CA eHealth Performance Manager’s support for VMware vSphere 4 and Cisco Nexus 1000V will deliver patented event correlation and root cause analysis that reduces “noise” by suppressing symptomatic alarms. The products will also deliver patented “deviation-from-normal” proactive performance management of virtual environments that helps identify performance issues before users and services are impacted. In addition, they are designed to deliver live interactive reporting for troubleshooting, as well historical trend reports for capacity planning reports.

CA’s object model will include a consolidated hierarchical view of VMware vCenter Server hosts, VMware vSphere 4 hosts, data centers, clusters, resource pools, virtual switches and virtual machines, all integrated with the existing physical infrastructure. This model-based management, resource monitoring approach will help reduce costs and increase staff efficiency by correlating physical and virtual data across the infrastructure to speed time to problem identification and resolution.

An enhanced automated discovery of the integrated physical and virtual network and systems environment will minimize manual efforts and help ensure an accurate understanding of the virtualized infrastructure.

CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and CA eHealth Performance Manager will also detect and track VMware VMotion migrations, dynamically updating the object model to reflect the most current state of the infrastructure. This feature is designed to provide up-to-date and real-time views of the integrated physical and virtual infrastructure without manual intervention.

CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager’s patented Inductive Modeling Technology RCA is being extended to isolate faults to physical servers and intelligently suppress symptomatic alarms on virtual machines. This will deliver only actionable alerts to IT operations, while correlating symptomatic alarms to the root cause and identifying virtual entities impacted by physical infrastructure failures.

Customers will be able to gain even more business value by using CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and CA eHealth Performance Manager in conjunction with CA Spectrum Automation Manager, the core of CA’s powerful business-driven automation solution. The ability to utilize real time inputs from CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and CA eHealth Performance Manager to dynamically provision and de-provision physical and virtual assets will be instrumental in customers’ efforts to increase business agility, service quality and control, as well as reduce risk and human error, minimize costs, and improve IT efficiency.