EMC, which has been focusing more research and development on software and services for the data center outside the specific scope of its storage infrastructure, March 11 launched a new tool that provides automated root-cause analysis for virtual infrastructures.

In a recent survey of IT managers regarding virtual machine management, the No. 1 problem that continues to crop up is this: isolating the root cause of problems throughout a complicated, far-flung virtualized infrastructure.

Smarts Server Manager aims to help IT administrators better manage virtualized data centers with a more complete drill-down into why change and other management problems happen, so they can be circumvented in the future.

It's all about automation and efficiency—two of the three biggest trends in the data center world at the moment. The third trend, naturally, is doing more with fewer capital resources.

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Smarts Server Manager is designed to complement the company's current set of VMware management tools. This automation process enables companies to discover what IT resources they have, check for IT compliance to policies, isolate root-cause problems and immediately fix any issues. 

"We're using all the instrumentation that [VMware] VirtualCenter provides and that customers already have to deploy their [ESX hypervisor] environment," said Bob Quillin, EMC's senior director of product marketing and resource management.

'Rich Degree of Automated Analytics'

What makes this tool stand out from competing products from, say, CA, BMC, IBM or Hewlett-Packard?

"It's the rich degree of automated analytics," Quillin said. "It's the ability to collect a large amount of information without having the customer write a rule or provide any intellect on their own. The product itself is built to provide a model of the infrastructure and automatically correlate where the issue is.

"So there's a high degree of automation intelligence that's built into Smarts. And you're able to do this across a range of inputs."

Smarts Server Manager increases IT operations' insight and control across mixed infrastructure environments, Quillin said. SSM also provides automated discovery and business-impact assessment of VMware ESX servers, and all other virtual machines and applications within the system.

Specifically, Smarts enables customers to identify root-cause issues across physical and virtual domains by extending EMC's Smarts Root Cause Analysis and Codebook Correlation technology to the virtual server environment. Using a behavioral model, Smarts is able to understand the relationships between virtual servers, physical servers and the network and distinguish how symptoms are propagated.  

Smarts Server Manager also monitors the "health" of Microsoft Cluster Services and Veritas Cluster Servers; helps IT operations identify when key application or service processes are unavailable; and integrates with server hardware monitoring suites from IBM, Dell and Sun to identify when servers are operating in a degraded state.

"Customers worldwide are effectively leveraging VMware-based virtualized servers to increase server utilization and decrease hardware costs," said Bob Laliberte, storage analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "But the dynamic nature of these environments creates significant challenges for those trying to manage them.

"Because VMware can rapidly move applications from one server to another to balance workloads, trying to manage VMs via manual methods is not sustainable, especially in large environments. Customers need solutions that automatically identify and isolate the location of virtual machines, as well as determine their relationships to other infrastructure elements and IT services. Only then can management happen in an automated fashion."

Smarts Server Manager, available now, is priced based on discovery and availability management per domain, as well as the number of devices being managed in each domain. For more information, go here.