Solidcore® Systems, Inc., the leader in change audit and configuration control, today announced its S3 Control™ software detects and validates change events to VMware environments in real time. Unlike previous methods that relied on multiple scan-based tools to manage change, the S3 Control software reconciles change events in real time from both virtual and physical infrastructures with an enterprise change management process. The Solidcore capabilities help customers define more comprehensive change policies and streamline the validation of changes throughout the IT environment to avoid costly downtime.

Enterprise IT organizations are under increasing pressure to maintain the integrity of virtual systems in production environments. They want to apply the same processes to virtual infrastructures that are in place for the physical infrastructures, which can also include best practices such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT) standards. Solidcore S3 Control eases the burden of managing the multitude of change events across virtualized systems by tracking changes on VMware ESX servers and virtual consoles in real time, alerting and reporting on change events, and correlating changes to authorization. All change events can be reconciled with an existing change management system, including HP Service Manager, BMC Remedy, CA Unicenter, and IBM Tivoli Service Desk.

“As an increasing number of customers adopt a ‘VMware first' policy for deploying new IT systems, the need to track and manage change across these virtual environments has become just as important as managing change on physical systems,” said Nand Mulchandani, senior director, product management and marketing, VMware. “By enabling changes in virtualized environments to be implemented in compliance with policies, Solidcore complements the robust security inherently built into VMware virtualized infrastructures.”

Solidcore S3 Control captures “who” is making changes, “what” is being changed, “when” change is occurring, “how” the change was implemented, and “where” the change was made. This enables IT organizations to ensure deployed virtual and physical systems are always in a known and verified state. Solidcore can track changes to user roles and permissions, data stores attached to ESX hosts, high-availability configurations, Virtual Machine (VM) templates, resource pools, scheduled tasks, and guest VMs. Solidcore can also identify new users that have been created, edited or deleted, new hosts added to VMware VirtualCenter, and license server events in virtual systems. S3 Control validates these changes against the change management system, where any changes with a corresponding ticket are marked “authorized” and the change management system is updated with the current change information. Changes that occur without a matching ticket are immediately identified for review.

“Only when you get control over change and map that change to your approved process do you easily realize a high degree of compliance, security and availability,” said Anne Bonaparte, president and CEO of Solidcore. “VMware deployments play an instrumental role in today's IT infrastructures and we are excited to be working with VMware to simplify the management of change in mission-critical virtualized environments.”

Availability

Solidcore's support for VMware ESX is available today in the latest release of the Solidcore S3 Control software. The software is available today from Solidcore for both new and existing S3 Control customers. For more information and pricing, please call +1-408-387-8400 or visit http://www.solidcore.com/products/s3control.html.