vProfile Bolsters Reflex Systems Management Suite
Building on its virtualization systems management foundation, Reflex Systems introduced vProfile, a configuration management tool that enables users to visually isolate configuration problems while insuring that internal and external configuration standards meet compliance requirements.
As part of the vendor's flagship Reflex Virtualization Management Center (VMC) family, vProfile competes with the steadily increasing number of graphics-oriented virtualization management packages entering the market by offering what it calls "heat maps" that depict geographical disparities in virtual infrastructure environments.
In addition to vProfile, other VMC modules include vTrust and vWatch Monitoring. All these modules are connected via a common VMC management console that Reflex Systems says "abstracts and stores information about the virtual infrastructure in a virtual CMDB and presents it in an easy-to-use graphical interface."
"It is a huge value that these modules are not point solutions but are all integrated," says Mike Wronski, VP of Product Management.
Reflex VMC reportedly tracks thousands of properties associated with hosts, VMs and virtual management servers such as VMware vCenter. vProfile uses storage, networking and virtual management servers and operational configuration types for hosts running hypervisors such as vSphere and ESXi. According to Wronski, the company is also considering adding compatibility management with Hyper-V and Xen hypervisors, although he says there is not currently sufficient demand to do so.
At first glance, VMC's sophisticated graphics seem similar to those offered by Xangati, another management vendor which recently debuted its latest virtualization management package for vCenter environments. Asked to compare the two, Wronski said that Xangati stresses performance monitoring while VMC is more oriented toward operations and configuration management.
Reflex says vProfile configuration management plots VM configuration changes according to a "heatmap interface that uses a color schema to signify disparities--the more configuration differences there are, the 'hotter' a particular area of the map shows the differences. In addition, users can leverage customized pivot tables to cross-tabulate and summarize configuration information to matrix different combinations of properties. Wronski says "There is a huge array of metrics to choose from."
He goes on to state that while Reflex and VMware have been development partners since 2006, the two companies are in "coopetition," especially with VMware's Host Profiles product. "We still work closely with VMware," he says, "and there are some gaps they leave open for us."
Pricing for each module, including VMC platform functionality, is $795 per socket, which the company says is "very similar" to the VMware pricing model.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/06/2010 at 12:48 PM