Solidcore® Systems, Inc., a leader in change audit and configuration control, today announced its S3 Control™ software reconciles and validates VMware change events in real time with HP's change management solution. This expands Solidcore's existing integration to give customers centralized control over both virtual and physical system changes.

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, reporting on change events, and correlating changes to authorized change tickets. S3 Control validates these changes against logged change tickets in the HP solution, where any changes with a corresponding ticket are marked “authorized” and the HP solution is updated with the current change information. Changes that occur without a matching ticket are immediately identified for review. These may reflect changes made manually rather than through change automation solutions such as HP Server Automation software.

“The frequency of change multiplies quickly as the footprint of virtual servers expands within a production environment,” said Ronni Colville, vice president and distinguished analyst for Gartner. “Maintaining compliance with regulatory requirements and minimizing service outages across virtual environments requires IT organizations to leverage tools that can report on this new facet of operational change while also reconciling change events from virtual infrastructure with approved change manifests.”

Solidcore can track changes to user roles and permissions, data stores attached to VMware 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.

“Sustaining compliance across virtual environments requires IT organizations to apply the same level of process and rigor that is used across the physical infrastructure,” said Anne Bonaparte, president and CEO of Solidcore. “Solidcore's extended integration with HP's change management solution provides a trusted system of record of whom or what is changing, or attempting to change, your virtual IT infrastructure.”

“Customers relying on virtualization across their production environments can further decrease costs, improve compliance and minimize the risk of downtime with HP and Solidcore,” said Jennifer Johnson, senior manager of product marketing, Software, HP. “The integration of Solidcore for verifying approved virtual and physical IT change with HP's change management solution will help customers using VMware to achieve new levels of IT compliance, control and service availability.”