In the last months the security vendor Tripwire took several steps to shift its business focus on the virtualization market, where its configuration management and compliance technology is badly needed.
At the beginning the company extended the capabilities of its flagship product, Tripwire Enterprise, to support VMware virtual infrastructures, but this approach is rarely the best option to enter a new market.
So the company developed and launched a new solution, just for virtualization, called vWire.
This new product extends the capabilities of two free tools that Tripwire released so far, OpsCheck and ConfigCheck, to offer something that goes beyond the configuration management.
In this first version in fact vWire is able to track changes and critical events in the virtual infrastructure, allowing the user to automate a reaction (like restoring a previous configuration), but in a future release the product will be able to correlate the configuration changes with the performance measurement of the virtual infrastructure, which is much more insightful way to troubleshoot the environment.
With its search engine and automation engine supporting PowerShell, vWire may compete in a short time with a lot of other vendors in different segments, from consolidated players like Vizioncore to young newcomers like Hyper9.
For now Tripwire only supports VMware Infrastructure 3.5, but it’s very likely an extension to Citrix and Microsoft hypervisors as soon as VMware will release its own configuration management solution ConfigControl.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.