Reflex Systems Introduces vProfile Configuration Management to Visualize and Remediate Configuration Differences in Virtual and Cloud Infrastructures

Atlanta, Georgia, 3/24/2010 - Reflex Systems, a pioneer in virtualization systems management solutions, today introduced vProfile, a new configuration management tool that enables IT managers to visually map configuration variances in their virtual infrastructure and enforces compliance with internal or external configuration standards. A fully integrated component of the Reflex Virtualization Management Center (VMC), vProfile provides a highly flexible framework for IT teams who aim to scale the virtual infrastructure while ensuring consistent configuration, meeting compliance and audit requirements and implementing IT automation for management tasks. With vProfile configuration management, Reflex customers can see their virtual infrastructure visually expressed as a "heatmap," enabling them to quickly identify configuration differences, remediate as needed and set configuration baselines.

"Managing configuration changes becomes increasingly complex in heavily virtualized environments. Virtualization administrators tasked with monitoring and understanding the impact of these changes must often rely on unwieldy tables and logs that make it nearly impossible to manage uniform configuration holistically across a large environment,” said Pete Privateer, President and CEO, Reflex Systems. “With vProfile, Reflex customers can visualize configuration differences across their entire virtual infrastructure and instantly pinpoint problem spots, set baselines, and where appropriate, proactively remediate issues before they become problems. By leveraging virtualization and integrated management tools like Reflex VMC, enterprises can reduce IT complexity and labor costs and bring new levels of IT management automation to the game."

Reflex VMC tracks thousands of properties associated with hosts, virtual machines and virtual management servers like VMware’s vCenter. vProfile configuration management utilizes networking, storage and operational configuration types for hosts running hypervisors such as VMware vSphere and ESXi. Virtual Machine profiles may contain configuration properties such as CPU, memory, storage, networking and advanced properties. vProfile also extends to the configuration of multiple vCenters to manage folders, resource pools, permissions, roles, access control, high availability and DRS.

By recognizing these properties in the virtual infrastructure, storing them in the Virtualization CMDB, and surfacing them through its patent-pending Virtualization Query Language (VQL), Reflex can provide true integrated systems management, encompassing security, configuration management, compliance and policy enforcement throughout the virtualized data center.

"Reflex Systems continues to innovate with its technology and approach to extending IT management through virtualization," said Rachel Chalmers, 451 Research Director, and Infrastructure Management. "By spanning the virtualization stack, including the vCenter, ESX host, guest VM, network and storage layers, and addressing security, monitoring and configuration management, Reflex's VMC provides a true systems management platform that fills a growing need in the market."

Key features of Reflex's vProfile configuration management tool include:

• Ability to Specify and Apply Baseline Profile Configuration - By establishing baselines within vProfile, users can create and apply profiles against other Hosts, VMs, or virtual management systems like VMware's vCenter in an environment, enabling administrators to ensure profiles are fully propagated
• Difference Visualization: Heatmaps and Customized Pivot Tables - Reflex vProfile configuration management plots VM configuration changes according to a graphical "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 also leverage customized pivot tables to cross tabulate and summarize configuration information to matrix different combinations of properties
• Remediation
  • Ad-Hoc Remediation - Administrators can select objects from the graphical heatmap, quickly identify differences or compare against the baseline profile, and in one click, apply changes to the objects being compared
  • Scheduled Remediation - Administrators can set a scheduled remediation time to apply profiles during a maintenance window. vProfile also provides a remediation preview that enables users to review the scheduled remediation to see what will be effected before applying the profiles
• "Any to Any" Comparison - Reflex vProfile configuration management allows administrators to automatically compare any profile, Host, virtual machine or vCenter to another like property, providing administrators with a powerful diagnostic tool to not only track variations in a given environment but actually understand the differences
• Tiered Configuration Profiles - vProfile enables users to set, apply and manage multiple profiles per object (VM, Host, vCenter) to support shared policy throughout the virtual infrastructure to include security profiles, storage profiles, network profiles, etc
• Historical Profile Definition - If a VM, Host or vCenter is configured incorrectly or is just not maintained, users can select or create a profile from a previous date/time when the system in question was functioning correctly to reset the configuration profile. Historical profiles can be assigned to any object within the virtual environment
• Batch Modification - Reflex vProfile provides the ability to quickly make mass updates throughout the entire infrastructure across global, multi-site data centers. For example, if an administrator wants to move the storage for 100 virtual machines, he can create a new VM profile by just setting the new storage configurations and scheduling the remediation to apply this new profile during a maintenance period. vProfile will automatically instrument the updated storage profile in parallel for all 100 VMs
• VQL Expression Queries - Reflex's patent-pending virtualization query language powers vProfile as well as the other components of VMC. Configuration profiles are based on VQL objects and the VQL language is used as the dynamic binding between profiles and the target of configuration change. This enables administrators to add and remove resources in their virtualized data centers without having to manually maintain their configuration baselines. VQL wizards are also provided so that users are not required to learn the details of the VQL language
• Executive Reports - vProfile provides a plethora of standard compliance & audit reports that show when Hosts, VMs or vCenters are out of compliance or differ from the set baseline so administrators can focus other tasks and be proactively notified with the highest priority configuration problems
• IP Pool Allocation - vProfile enables users to allocate IP addresses from a pool rather than manual allocation for configuration properties such as vMotion and Fault Tolerance network interfaces. This provides a greater level of automation by eliminating custom scripting and maintenance of numerous scripts

For more information on the new vProfile configuration management capabilities, please visit http://reflexsystems.com/Products/vProfile or http://blog.reflexsystems.com.

Reflex Systems' VMC provides overall declarative data center management and automation by correlating infrastructure configuration changes, network services and security events for performance impact. vProfile configuration management, the newly released component of the VMC platform, complements vTrust Security and vWatch Monitoring. All three components are linked together through a common VMC management console that abstracts and stores information about the virtual infrastructure in a virtual CMDB and presents it in an easy-to-use graphical interface. The VMC architecture is built on a commonVQL that binds all of this data together and provides integration across all components within the virtualization infrastructure stack including the vCenter, host, guest and network and storage layers. VQL also serves as the integration point for third-party solutions and service providers leveraging the Reflex VMC Cloud API.

Reflex will host a complimentary Webinar on vProfile configuration management. The Webinar takes place Tuesday, March 30 at 2pm ET/11am PT. Space is limited. Reserve your seat now at: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/395811235.

About Reflex
Reflex Systems is the industry leader in virtualization management and security. Reflex VMC (Virtualization Management Center) dramatically increases the visibility, management and security of an organization's virtual infrastructure. Purpose-built on a strong security foundation, VMC provides the essential tools needed to enforce dynamic infrastructure policy in virtualized data centers. Reflex VMC provides infrastructure discovery and visualization, timeline-based management, application/services discovery, network security, performance, lifecycle management and dynamic policy enforcement. Reflex VMC supports VMware's ESX server, Citrix's XenServer, and Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtual server environments. Reflex Systems is based in Atlanta, Georgia and is privately held. For more information, including a trial download of Reflex VMC, visit www.reflexsystems.com. Follow Reflex at http://twitter.com/ReflexSystems and The vCurve Blog: blog.reflexsystems.com. Reflex Systems is a registered trademark of Reflex Systems LLC. All other marks are property of their respective owners.

Reflex Systems is a registered trademark of Reflex Systems, Inc. All other marks are property of their respective owners.

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