HP and BMC tackle virtualisation management

Growing numbers of virtual machines can bring new management headaches

HP and BMC have unveiled new products and services designed to help large organisations implement and manage a virtualised IT infrastructure.

Virtualisation has gained acceptance as a means of consolidating servers and enabling failover and disaster recovery processes, but growing numbers of virtual machines can also bring new management headaches.

Both firms are aiming to address this with tools to manage physical and virtual systems, backed by services to help with planning and implementation.

HP announced that its Operations Agent, Performance Agent and SiteScope tools have been enhanced with hypervisor management capabilities, while a new Asset Manager identifies and manages an organisation's virtual machine asset inventory and the associated software licences.

Meanwhile, new HP Virtualisation Accelerator Services are available for planning, designing and implementing virtual deployments.

There are also new planning, quick-start and implementation services for the company's virtual desktop infrastructure which replaces desktop PCs with server-based virtual client machines.

BMC said that its new integrated solutions proactively manage the entire physical and virtual infrastructure, preventing business service outages and driving down costs.

The company's BMC Performance Management tool is capable of managing an organisation's entire software stack, including virtual infrastructure, virtual machines and applications.

This can be backed by BMC Application Performance and Analytics to monitor service levels, plus BMC Capacity Management to monitor and prioritise server workloads.

Another component, BMC Discovery Solution, is designed to stop server sprawl by finding virtual servers anywhere in the infrastructure.

Like HP, BMC is offering professional services to help customers get up and running in the shape of its Virtualisation Capacity Management and Planning Service.

HP also unveiled new hardware as part of its virtualisation line-up. The HP ProLiant BL495c is the world's first server blade designed specifically to host virtual machines, according to the firm.

New HP t5630, t5545, t5540 and t5145 thin clients for virtual desktop infrastructure have expanded multimedia features, enhanced brokering capabilities, greater performance and improved management support.