Getting Real About Virtual Management

White Paper
Getting Real About
Virtual Management
Virtual Platform Management:
CA's Solution to Manage
Complex Infrastructures
Pam SnaithESM Product MarketingJanuary 2007Table of ContentsReal Management of Virtual Environments .................................................................................................................................................. 3Management Challenges in Virtual Environments ......................................................................................................................................3CA's Approach for Comprehensive Management of Virtual Environments ..........................................................................................4The Benefit of CA's Approach to Virtualization Challenges ......................................................................................................................7Unicenter ASM Features by Discipline ..........................................................................................................................................................8Summary..............................................................................................................................................................................................................10
2physical machine-to physical entities is a must. Not onlyReal Management of must they be mapped but they must also be depicted in someVirtual Environments visually intuitive fashion. Without this capability you canCA's vision is to unify and simplify the management of easily become a victim of the "law of unintendedenterprise-wide IT. The rapidly growing use of virtualization consequences." While server consolidation may have drivenand clustering in enterprise infrastructures provides a rich the initial use of virtualized server platforms, in practice thereenvironment for increasing complexity. Unlike physically may be some unexpected results. For example, consider anbounded infrastructures, the logical entities in virtualized organization that wants to reduce their server deploymentand clustered environments are not visually apparent. from 300 to 30, where each server hosts 10 virtual machines.Nevertheless, you need to know what resources you have Virtualization makes it easy to configure additional virtualand if you are using those resources to their fullest capacity. machines. The result can be that virtual machines begin toIn your server consolidation initiatives you need to ensure proliferate, resulting in what is often referred to as "virtualyou are making efficient use of resources. In your virtualized sprawl". As a result, IT organizations find it difficult, if notenvironments you need to ensure critical applications receive impossible, to keep track of all of these virtual machines asthe right allocation of shared resources. In your clustered they continue to propagate, so that 300 virtual machines onenvironments you need to simplify the management of these 30 servers turn into 450 virtual machines on 30 servers. critical multi vendor assets. In delivering on Service LevelAgreements you need to ensure the services you provide andsupport are not interrupted and that they meet internal andexternal customer expectations. In the realm of virtualizationthis means optimizing the existing IT server investments sothat they are service driven, integrated, modular and open.These needs call for a comprehensive management solution.
This paper will briefly discuss the technical managementchallenges inherent in these complex infrastructuresincluding centralizing management of virtual, physical andclustered environments, virtual sprawl, honoring service levelagreements, resource allocation and the prioritization ofresources. Then it will demonstrate how CA Virtual PlatformManagement addresses the specific requirements of these Operating System Virtualization environments, making it possible for you to view and manage Virtualized operating systems run on a server with a singlelogical entities as easily and as well as physical entities. host operating system. Multiple operating systems are notsupported but overhead is reduced.
Management Challenges in Virtual EnvironmentsHeterogeneity adds a great deal of complexity to ITinfrastructures and IT infrastructures have diversity onmany counts-vendors, software systems, hardwareplatforms, operating system virtualization, servervirtualizati... [download for more]