It’s no secret that the rapid adoption of data center virtualization, while providing the clear cost savings of server consolidation, creates a much more difficult environment for the management of performance and availability of virtualized applications. While other management vendors tout their ability to capture metrics from virtual environments, their tools still require massive amounts of manual effort to solve performance problems and simply cannot scale in a virtualized environment. Integrien Corporation, the leader in intelligent systems management, is taking a new approach to virtualization management by automating much of this manual effort in today’s highly dynamic and complex virtualized environments.

The company announced its strategy for delivering this with new capabilities in Integrien Alive. In particular, Integrien now provides support for virtual agent technologies from IBM, HP, Hyperic and nworks. With these integrations, Integrien Alive now provides support for the following virtual environments:

• VMware
• Microsoft Virtual Server
• Citrix XenServer
• IBM AIX/IBM System P
• Sun Solaris Containers

This allows Alive to accurately understand the behavior of each virtual machine (VM) and use its advanced correlation techniques to understand the complex interactions that lead to problems within those components. As a result, Integrien Alive helps organizations to reap substantial ROI from their virtualization initiatives by doing the following:

• Optimizes the entire lifecycle of an organization’s virtualization initiative from determining initial candidates to proactively managing the virtualized production environment
• Learns the normal behavior of virtual components and alerts only to abnormal behaviors that are true precursors to problems
• Automatically adapts its algorithms to handle moving virtual machines
• Correlates the complex interdependencies of a virtual environment so IT operations can dynamically optimize resource allocations
• Proactively notifies of pending problems in a virtual environment so they can be resolved before they occur
• Operates seamlessly in a hybrid virtual/physical environment

“Virtualization is one of the highest priority initiatives in recent IT history, as industry analysts estimate that more than 70 percent of IT departments are pursuing server consolidation projects,” said Steve Henning, VP of Marketing at Integrien. “However the reality for many companies is that virtualization introduces a whole new set of performance-related problems that are more difficult to diagnose. Throwing more bodies at the problem, while investing more in traditional monitoring, is not the answer because it simply won’t scale. Instead, organizations should look to a real-time analytics-based performance management solution, like Integrien Alive, which automates much of the manual effort in the troubleshooting process in both virtual and physical environments.”

Integrien is committed to the continuous enhancement of virtualization performance management. In the future, Alive will provide additional advanced analytics capabilities and visualizations to arm organizations with an even more effective approach to virtual environment performance management. Through these advanced capabilities, Alive will alert users in real-time to capacity-related issues for VMs and VM pools based on observed abnormal trends. This will allow proactive measures to be taken to avoid performance problems. Additional visualizations will also be provided for virtual environments that will allow users to understand the health of their virtual environment at a glance and identify potential problems quickly.