Quoting eWeek

Altiris on Dec. 13 will come out with a grab bag of server management enhancements in the latest release of its Altiris Server Management Suite.

The Salt Lake City-based Altiris will build on its existing virtual server deployment capability for VMware ESX by adding the ability to inventory virtual servers.

"Now we can do [an] inventory [check] to see what's happening inside a virtual machine and we can deliver software [upgrades] to those virtual machines," said Steve Morton, vice president of product management at Altiris.

Although the deployment and inventory function is specific today to VMware ESX virtual servers, Altiris intends to expand that next year to Xen and Microsoft virtual machine environments, Morton said.

Beyond the virtual server management enhancements, Altiris in version 6.2 of the suite added patch management for Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers, performance and fault monitoring for Microsoft Exchange Server and SQL Server as well as the ability to inventory Exchange and SQL Server.

"From the same single Web console, people can update Windows or Linux machines and keep them up-to-date. The same architecture that we have will allow us to broaden that platform support to various flavors of Linux," said Morton.

Version 6.2 of the suite is available now and starts at $253 per managed node.

Altiris in early December got a major boost for its hardware and software management efforts when Dell announced that its new OpenManage software is based on Altiris technology.

OpenManage delivers operating system and hardware patch management; hardware health monitoring for Dell servers running Windows and Linux; remote configuration for hardware, operating systems and applications integrated with the Dell Server Assistant catalog and support for Dell's latest servers.

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