BMC Software Ensures Operational Accuracy Amidst the Constant Change of Virtual Environments

As IT organizations move from physical to highly virtualized infrastructures, they are inevitably forced to deal with a higher rate of change due to virtual machine (VM) movement among hypervisors. IT needs a platform in place to automatically detect and intelligently respond to these events in order to provide an accurate picture of its operations.

BMC Software (NYSE:BMC) today announced new capabilities for dynamic detection and intelligent response to VM infrastructure changes. These capabilities ensure unprecedented accuracy both for operational performance monitoring and service-based decision support.

Through integration with VMware vCenter™ Server, BMC’s BSM platform can now detect VMware VMotion™ events and automatically respond by adjusting performance monitoring thresholds, maintaining performance history tracking VM changes and updating the configuration management database (CMDB) in near-real time. This helps ensure IT organizations can maintain performance continuity, make accurate decisions based on the most up-to-date information and meet compliance and audit regulations.

“VMware vSphere™ 4 supports functionality like VMware VMotion™ that enables IT environments to be dynamic and responsive,” said Shekar Ayyar, vice president of infrastructure alliances at VMware. “BMC provides robust automated detection and response to VM movements, optimizing service and data center processes with up-to-date CMDB service views and accurate change process tracking while minimizing performance monitoring disruptions. These solution enhancements are a strong complement to the work VMware has been doing with BMC to tie VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager to BMC Remedy IT Service Management (ITSM). Whether change is planned or unplanned, our joint customers will have access to desired levels of policies and controls to help ensure compliance.”

Until now, many performance monitoring solutions treated a moved VM as if it were a brand new machine instance, thus losing valuable historical performance information that should be tied to that machine. By maintaining this continuity, BMC ensures that customers preserve service availability and can predict service failure and proactively respond. Without such continuity, performance monitoring solutions provide little or no value in a dynamic virtual or cloud computing environment.

Similarly organizations unable to keep their Configuration Management Database (CMDB) systems accurate and up-to-date with VM changes often have difficulty making valid IT decisions and producing reliable compliance reports. By automatically applying these updates, organizations can continue to rely on their CMDB as the single, accurate source of truth.

According to an independent Forrester Research, Inc. report: “Tightened budgets have ratcheted up the always high pressure on IT organizations to control costs while maintaining or improving service levels. In the past several years, infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals have realized the importance of a CMDB as the "source of the truth" guaranteeing service levels, avoiding risky changes, and reducing incident response times, especially in the face of exploding infrastructure complexity. However, along the way I&O pros have also encountered the challenges of trying to maintain an up-to-date central database of diverse data — at best it is complicated and imposes an extra burden on infrastructure and personnel. At worst, it produces old or inaccurate data that's worse than nothing at all. Inaccurate information yields erroneous decisions that require wasteful redo and data collection and processing in an ad hoc manner.”1

“It’s very easy for a highly complex virtual or cloud IT environment to spiral out of control, so it’s critical that organizations have the proper mechanisms in place to ensure changes and events are promptly detected, well documented and reacted upon appropriately,” said Kia Behnia, BMC’s chief technology officer. “The enhancements to our BSM platform allow organizations to remain agile in the face of change and respond quickly to events that deliver the greatest business impact.”

To learn more about implementing effective processes and controls in virtual environments, read the BMC Software and VMware jointly authored Best Practices White Paper, “Seven Requirements for Balancing Control and Agility in the Virtual Environment” located at this link.

For more information, visit www.bmc.com/virtualization

For more information on related BMC products, solutions and services, please visit:

BMC Atrium CMDB Enterprise Manager

BMC Atrium CMDB Enterprise ManagerBMC ProactiveNet Performance Management

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The most demanding IT organizations in the world rely on BMC Software across both distributed and mainframe environments. Recognized as the leader in Business Service Management, BMC’s comprehensive approach and unified platform help IT organizations cut cost, reduce risk and drive business profit. For the four fiscal quarters ended June 30, 2009, BMC revenue was approximately $1.88 billion. Visit BMC.com for more information.

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1 Inquiry Spotlight: CMDB And CMS, Q3 2009, Forrester Research, Inc., July 16, 2009.

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