A couple of weeks ago I attended a vBlock Seminar at Getronics Consulting (my employer BTW). At this seminar a guy named Erik Slooff employed by EMC (not to be confused with Eric Sloof from NTPRO.nl) spoke about EMC’s management tooling around vBlock and mentioned EMC sold a couple of tools to VMware. This made me curious and got me digging up some info about it. I’ve had it in draft for some time, but somehow could not finish it. So here it is.

The EMC Ionix portfolio consists of a range of different apps, a couple of them only recently acquired by EMC. In February EMC sold 4 out of the range of products from the Ionix portfolio to VMware.

The products will become/are part of the vCenter product family, just as labmanager and lifecycle manager are right now. The products:

1. Server Configuration Manager (formerly Configuresoft)
2. FastScale
3. Application Discovery Manager (formerly nLayers)
4. Service Manager (formerly Infra)

Server Configuration Manager

The first to be branded as a vCenter product on the VMware site is vCenter Configuration Manager (formerly called EMCIonix Server Configuration Manager). It collects, stores, fixes, and manages configuration settings from servers and workstations, across physical and virtual environments. With this critical data, VCM eliminates the hassle and expense associated with using multiple tools for managing change, patching, configuration, remediation and compliance.

With VCM you receive automatic alerts when your systems need to be remediated to a desired configuration state to ensure compliance or resolve problems. You can automate common tasks to increase operational efficiency, decrease costs, and regain control over your physical and virtual IT infrastructure. You can also virtualize your environment securely and successfully. In order to confidently enable the transition of tier one applications in a virtual data center, compliance and security must be equal, if not better, than the physical data center it came from. To be successful in moving to a virtualized infrastructure, organizations will need to implement a continuous approach to management.

link to EMC datasheet (pdf): Data Sheet

The old website http://www.configuresoft.com still is alive when I’m writing this and might hold some info that may not be on the VMware or EMC website.

link to the VMware vCenter product webpage: http://www.vmware.com/products/configuration-manager/

link to the VMware communities webcorner for vCenter Configuration Manager: http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/mgmt/vcm

The download link now points to the Compliance checker, which is a free downloadable tool.

Fastscale

EMC bought Fastscale in the 2nd half of 2009. FastScale’s technology is focused on simplifying application and server stack management and easing deployment of physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures. Using FastScale technology, companies can run datacenters with up to three times more virtual machines without degrading performance. FastScale’s flagship product — FastScale Composer Suite — is an automated platform for building, optimizing, managing and deploying application environments in physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures. The product allows customers to streamline software stacks automatically and dynamically deploy logical servers to physical, virtual or cloud within minutes.

Source: http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/emc-acquires-cloud-support-vendor-fastscale-883

Application Discovery Manager

EMC bought nlayers in 2006 and with that it became part of “EMC smarts” which later was integrated in the Ionix Suite as EMC Ionix Application Discovery Manager. It provides continuous discovery and mapping of applications, their dependencies, and configurations with respect to their underlying infrastructure in data center environments. With Ionix Application Discovery Manager, you get accurate, real-time visibility into the data center from an application standpoint—critical for planning data center consolidations and migrations as well as managing change impact, virtualization initiatives, disaster recovery, and configuration management database (CMDB) population.

Source: http://www.emc.com/products/detail/software/application-discovery-manager.htm

Service Manager

Service Manager is a tool formerly owned by a company called Infra. EMC called it Ionix Service Manager and it was EMC’s only tool in the Service Management area. Service Manager has a strong link to ITIL Service Management. One of the company’s that “approves” VMware Service Manager is ITIL-shop Pink Elephant now HQ based in Canada, but originated in The Netherlands in the 1980’s. (my former employer). Pink Elephant verified the tool to be compliant with the ITIL processes as defined by the ITSMF.

On the EMC-site and even on the Infra-corp-site there still is a lot of information available: