Fortisphere Tracks Virtual Machine Movement

But keeping track of all that movement represents a systems management challenge. To address this problem, Fortisphere has rolled out vRadar, a new component for its Virtual Service Manager platform, at the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas. Here's a look at the interface.

According to Fortisphere CEO Siki Giunta, vRadar keeps track of the relationship between a particular virtual machine and the applications that run on top of it and the rest of the physical IT infrastructure. vRadar works by embedding agent software into each guest operating system running on top of the virtual machine, which in turn communicates information about its status back to the Fortisphere console.

Most IT organizations have not embraced the next generation of virtualization yet because of the challenges associated with managing virtual machine software as it moves around the enterprise. Giunta says that she expects to see next-generation virtualization architectures become more common once IT organizations have systems management tools in place that reduce the complexity associated with managing those types of virtual machine deployments.