BladeLogic, Inc., a leading provider of data centre automation software, today announced the availability of BladeLogic Virtualisation Manager™, a new software solution to enable seamless management of physical and virtual computing platforms. BladeLogic Virtualisation Manager, a new module in the BladeLogic Operations Manager™ suite of data centre automation solutions, contains rich functionality to browse, provision, patch, audit, remediate, administer and manage virtual servers.

By allowing multiple operating systems to be housed on one physical device, server virtualisation helps IT organisations reduce capital costs and address important IT initiatives such as server consolidation and business continuity. However, as server virtualisation steadily gains acceptance, IT organisations recognize that to fully embrace server virtualisation in production environments they require data centre automation tools to effectively manage this new computing platform. For example, a normally trivial issue of providing server access to a systems administrator becomes far more complicated in a virtualised environment. Organisations will no longer be able to just provide physical access to a particular box, but rather have to provide “functional” access – due to the variety and class of virtual instances that may be housed on a single physical machine – based on the skills and functional privileges of the administrator. Moreover, the requirement for cross-platform tools to seamlessly manage the heterogeneity of virtual and physical computing platforms becomes even more important.

“While virtualisation technology makes it easier to address important initiatives such as server consolidation, the proliferation of virtualisation significantly exacerbates the overall challenge of managing today’s data centre computing resources,” said Vijay Manwani, Chief Technology Officer, BladeLogic. “BladeLogic Virtualisation Manager’s ability to perform sophisticated management tasks in a virtualized environment provides IT organisations with a single platform for managing both virtual and physical server environments, with the goal of supporting more rapid adoption of virtualisation with less risk and lower costs.”

By providing out-of-the-box native support for the industry’s leading server virtualisation technology, VMware ESX, BladeLogic Virtualisation Manager is designed to enable IT organisations to seamlessly manage, control and enforce configuration changes to both virtual and physical server and application environments allowing them to respond more quickly to changing business requirements in order to maximize business value from the data centre.

Key features of BladeLogic Virtualisation Manager include:

• A single interface and unified policy for virtual and physical server environments resulting in highly consistent management of server and application configurations
• Native support for tasks such as provisioning, deleting, starting and stopping virtual machines with built-in auditing capabilities
• Granular role-based access control that can be managed at the virtual host, virtual machine or configuration level to control, track and report on user activity and configuration changes
• Rules-based auditing to provide flexible and accurate auditing within and across virtual and physical servers
• Integrated packaging and remediation of virtual host and machine configurations to allow for easy portability and resource tuning across servers and data centres

For more information about BladeLogic Virtualisation Manager, please contact BladeLogic at +1-781-257-3500 or sales@bladelogic.com.

To see a demonstration of BladeLogic Virtualisation Manager at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in San Francisco, April 23-25, please visit BladeLogic in booth # 704.