Smart Management

Smart Management for Virtual Infrastructures™

The speed, scale, and complexity of virtual environments demand new approaches to management, capable of addressing the issues virtualization brings. ManageIQ's Smart Management technologies deliver the insight, control, and automation needed to successfully realize the strategic value promised by virtualization.

Continuous Any Time, Any State Visibility

Many functions traditionally performed on individual systems can - and should - be moved out of those systems, up into the virtualization layer. Manage IQ’s SmartState™ technology leverages comprehensive understanding of virtual assets, formats, relationships, and dependencies to provide unparalleled visibility into virtual assets. The ability to examine and evaluate VMs at any time, in any state, is essential to the continuous management of virtual environments. This removes the need for systems to be started or change state just to gain real-time visibility into their current configuration. Starting offline or paused systems to manage them creates complexity, consumes resources and introduces risk.

The ManageIQ Virtual BlackBox™ provides a dependable, resilient source of management information, including unique identification of virtual machines, genealogy, life cycle events and configuration metadata. Virtual BlackBox and SmartState analysis technology work with any virtual machine or appliance. ManageIQ’s Smart Management for Virtual Environments unique, non-invasive approach creates a more effective, less complex environment by reducing the number of agents or drivers to be installed, maintained, licensed, and patched. In addition to more accurate management, that also means quicker implementations and quicker time-to-value.

Real-Time, Policy-Based Control

Virtual systems move faster than ever before. Systems are created, cloned, used, moved, and deleted in a matter of minutes. SmartState™ technology avoids the problems of traditional approaches to keep pace in these dynamic environments. SmartState management technology provides continuous visibility, avoiding the gaps resulting from point-in-time, “only when running” management systems. SmartHost™ technology enables real-time changes to policies and immediate enforcement of those policies across the environment. SmartVM™ technology prevents VMs from running outside of the managed environment reducing security risk from VM theft.

Real-time policy management is enabled defining:

• Configuration Policies - which components systems should and should not - have installed. Which systems can be cloned, copied, created, and what systems should be retired.
• Operational Policies - where systems are allowed to run, where can they be moved, and what the acceptable accounts, software, and settings are for that environment.
• User Policies - limits on which individuals or groups are to be allowed access to and control of specific virtual machines.

Intelligence, Visualization and Analytics for the Virtual Environment

It’s essential that administrators, managers, and operators be able to quickly grasp even the nuances of their virtual environment’s configuration and structure. ManageIQ’s Virtual Intelligence™ capabilities enable powerful visualization and analysis functions including baselining, drift analysis, and system comparisons. This enables managers to check virtual machines against baselines to determine variance from standards, while drift analysis can quickly indicate differences from as built or as bought configurations. Comparison of VMs between clones, throughout VM generations and genealogy, as well as ad-hoc comparisons provide powerful insight into the systems. Virtual Intelligence also provides comprehensive drill-down, rich visualization and powerful analytics about the virtual environment. Virtual Timeline™ enables visualization of virtual life cycle events across time.

Real-time Automation for the Virtual Environment

SmartState™ technology delivers the low latency, highly reliable data necessary to automate management at virtual speeds. ManageIQ’s Virtual Management Database™ provides the definitive source of virtual configuration management since the SmartState™ technology used to capture this information avoids inaccuracies caused by VM-based agents that don’t know about snapshots or clones, as well as discovering critical relationships. Direct interrogation of VMs and appliances avoids errors due to:

• Stale Data – occurs when VM hasn’t run management agents in awhile
• Incorrect Data – occurs when VM reverted to previous snapshot
• Clone/Duplicate name – same named system missed updates

Real-time tracking of relationships, dependencies and genealogy combined with comprehensive asset information allows managers and management process - such as change and release management, operations, and problem management - to exploit the Virtual Management Database™ to access a rich store of configuration data about the virtual environment.