How to Control All Those Virtual Lies in Your Data Center

Everything’s rapidly becoming virtualized — in data storage, in the data center, in video game playing, in life itself. Movies, for example, are becoming mostly virtualized, with increasing numbers of computer-created images replacing real, live video.

For the record, virtualization is really a big lie; it’s the creation of a virtual — rather than a physical — version of something, such as an operating system, a server, a storage device or network resources. However, the big lie of virtualization can lead to many good things, including less electrical power being used, easier management by humans and better utilization of IT machines — like application servers and storage appliances.

This is becoming so widespread in data centers — and so quickly — that virtual machine management has given rise to its own cottage industry. VMs are running rampant, and they need to be controlled. To the rescue: Fortisphere, a provider of enterprise VM life-cycle management software.

The small (fewer than 50 employees), 1-year-old company this week announced the availability of Fortisphere Virtual Essentials, a VM life-cycle management suite that provides organizations with “cradle-to-grave identification, tracking, reporting and management of online and offline virtual machines,” Chief Marketing Officer Dave Capuano told The Station.

Virtual Essentials delivers heretofore unseen visibility and control throughout enterprise virtual infrastructures, Capuano said. It’s all policy-driven and enforced.

“The continued growth in the enterprise adoption of virtualization technologies is [causing the] surfacing [of] operational challenges in many areas, but chief among the concerns identified by our research is managing virtual machine sprawl,” Gartner Research Vice President Cameron Haight said in a report. “This, along with the need for improved virtual machine visibility, will increasingly motivate IT organizations to begin to look for tools that can reduce virtualization management complexity (and potential exposure) while maximizing virtualization administrator efficiency.”

Virtual Essentials delivers IT staff real-time purview, correlative analysis and policy-based control of all virtual machine configuration, network communications, services, and state and system resources, Capuano said. The suite provides multiplatform support for VMware, XenSource and Microsoft work across desktops, workstations and servers, he added.

We can’t have VMs running around untethered anymore. It’s time to take charge of these little lies now and get them all pulling in the same direction for the good of the company.

Mark Twain, The Station’s favorite journalist of all time, said it succinctly: “Always tell the truth. That way you don’t have to remember anything.”

If you’re using virtualization anywhere in your system, you’re telling lies. But Fortisphere will help you remember everything.

More info? Go here.