Embotics and Fortisphere are not the only startups emerging in the virtual machines lifecycle management market. A third, expected competitor unveils today: ManageIQ.
The company founded in 2006 and based in Mahwah, NJ, is managed by Joseph J. Fitzgerald, former CTO and Director of Product Development at HP, and Oleg Barenboim, R&D Leader at HP.
ManageIQ is mostly privately funded, with the exception of Worldwide Technology Partner investment.
At launch date two products are presented, EVM Insight and EVM Control, available as stand-alone solutions or as bundle in the Enterprise Virtualization Management suite.
The first one, EVM Insight, is a web-based virtualization management solution with some new and interesting features in the space like:
- capability to super-manage multiple virtualization management products and instances of the same product (VMware VirtualCenter only in the first version) at the same time
- capability to track events happening to a virtual machine inside a so called Virtual BlackBox, which follows the VM but doesn’t stay inside the guest OS
- capability to discover detailed informations about guest OS, including installed patches, applications, users, with an agentless technology (even for offline VMs)
The second one, EVM Control, is the real lifecycle management solution bringing granular policy management in the virtual data center with:
- capability to define security policies to prevent rogue virtual machines power on or virtual network access (what a security professional would define as endpoint security for virtual environments)
- capability to simulate policies application with what-if impact analysis
- capability to enforce separation of duties
ManageIQ is already a VMware and XenSource technology partner and in fact products support will be extended to Xen in Q1 2008.
Both products will be available at the end of December.
ManageIQ entrance in the market is welcome, given the number of complex challenges that biggest virtualization adopters are facing today.
Anyway on the long run the company approach, mostly because of its management part, will put it in competition not only with other young VM lifecycle management competitors, but also with biggest technology providers. Microsoft is the first one on the list, with its combined offering of Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), Operation Manager (SCOM) and Configuration Manager (SCCM).
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.