Ipswitch to offer unified virtualisation management

WhatsUp Gold will still be licensed based on the number of physical machines

Network management vendor Ipswitch is planning to extend its products to cover virtual infrastructures, offering administrators the ability to manage both virtual and physical machines with a single console.

But, unlike some unified management tools, customers will pay only for the number of physical machines managed, according to the firm.

Ipswitch said that the new capabilities will be provided in an extension to its WhatsUp Gold network management suite, set to ship sometime early in 2010. However, a technical preview programme for select customers is due to get under way in the near future, following a forthcoming update of the product due at the end of October.

"We're hearing from customers that they don't want separate management systems for physical and virtual machines," said Kevin Gillis, vice president of product management and development at Ipswitch.

"Today, our product line can discover virtual machines, but the next wave is to go beyond this. We're working with key virtualisation vendors and using their APIs to go into virtual environments, so you won't see any difference when managing them."

Support will come first for VMware's ESX and ESXi, but Ipswitch eventually plans to support virtual machines running on Microsoft's Hyper-V and Citrix's Xen platforms as well.

However, Gillis said that Ipswitch did not intend to entirely replace VMware's management tools, but to make it easy for administrators to do the everyday tasks from a single management suite.

"Some rudimentary management processes admins want to be able to do without having to switch between consoles for physical and virtual machines. We expect to pick up the most common 30 to 80 per cent of tasks they do," he explained.

One key selling point for customers is that Ipswitch plans to continue to license WhatsUp Gold based on the number of physical machines managed, rather than the virtual machines running on them.

"Customers appreciate that we're not sticking it to them on licensing, and this whole model will carry through. If one host has four, six, eight or 20 virtual machines, it is still just one host to us," Gillis said.

The company also hinted that WhatsUp Gold might also be extended in future to manage the applications and services running on the virtual machines, akin to the capabilities offered by VMware's vSphere and vCenter.

"Our first phase will be adding support for the three big virtualisation vendors. Beyond that, we will look at managing not just machines but the services on them," said Gillis.