Application Discovery and Best Practices for VMware Released by EMC

EMC Corp. unveiled the newest version of its application discovery and dependency mapping solution — EMC Smarts Application Discovery Manager (ADM) 6.0. Core to Version 6.0 is the solution’s full support for VMware virtualized environments — dramatically extending IT operations’ visibility and control across physical, virtual and mixed data centers.

Smarts ADM 6.0’s comprehensive insight into business applications and the supporting IT infrastructure in VMware environments helps IT support its service levels to the business. New to Smarts ADM 6.0 is the Smarts ADM ‘Virtual Listener,’ which introduces breakthrough virtual management capabilities eliminating the need to deploy agents with every virtual machine. Passively ‘listening’ to application traffic across the VMware Virtual Switch (vSwitch), data center managers benefit from dynamic, real-time visibility into virtual relationships. The end result establishes dependencies of virtual machines to one another in the delivery of business application services and for the construction of data protection and disaster recovery plans for VMware Site Recovery Manager and VMware Consolidated Backup.

When used in conjunction with EMC IT Compliance Analyzer — Application Edition 1.1, also announced today — Smarts ADM dramatically increases user control over virtual environments to help facilitate IT compliance within VMware implementation strategies, VMware operational best practices, and regulatory requirements such as PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) and HIPAA.

"VMware has the potential to bring a new level of speed and efficiency to businesses today, enabling companies to deploy new systems and applications faster. It can also enable superior business continuity for critical services by providing a resilient and dynamic set of resources to draw from to support desired levels of application service performance," said Dennis Drogseth, Vice President, EMA. "But transforming the data center doesn’t come without critical changes in management tools, which need to adapt."

"VMware virtualization has streamlined IT management for data centers of all sizes that often have a mix of both virtual and physical environments," said Parag Patel, Vice President, Alliances at VMware. "EMC’s new Application Discovery Manager combined with VMware virtualization helps customers to effectively manage these mixed environments. The solution provides our customers with the visibility to monitor the application infrastructure while benefiting from the business advantages of VMware virtualization, including reduced capital and operating expenses, high levels of business continuity, strengthened security and improved energy efficiencies."

Smarts Application Discovery Manager complements VMware VirtualCenter by enabling IT operations to automatically track and manage configuration changes and understand virtual-to-physical relationships in the application infrastructure. The solution continuously provides full visibility into the application services dependencies across a VMware-enabled infrastructure.

The solution also enables IT organizations to:

Comply with Best Practices for Planning and Optimizing VMware-enabled Data Centers, such as:

• Viewing application dependencies to enhance configuration planning
• Improving resource utilization by automatically identifying virtual machines no longer in use
• Identifying VMware ESX hosts that are not currently managed by VMware VirtualCenter
• Applying policies that check VMware VMotion activity for optimal configurations
• Understanding application dependencies and usage to optimally configure VMware ESX hosts

Build Data Protection Plans for VMware environments, Including VMware Site Recovery Manager and VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB)
Populate CMDBs to Leverage and Maintain VMware and Physical Infrastructure Information

"EMC’s view is that virtualization in general, and VMware specifically, are redefining the data center. Today’s announcement demonstrates our commitment to leading the way in VMware integrated management tools," said Chris Gahagan, EMC’s Senior Vice President, Resource Management Software. "The announcements complement existing VMware management solutions, such as EMC ControlCenter 6.0 — effectively bridging the management gap between physical and virtual data centers and across the full stack, including applications, network and storage."