Last week Reflex Systems (formerly Reflex Security) introduced a new module called vProfile as part of its Virtualization Management Center (VMC) 2.0 launched in September 2009.
The company published an extensive explanation of how the new component works on its corporate blog:
vProfile is built entirely on top of the VQL language developed by Reflex. VQL provides a layer of abstraction from the database and the virtual infrastructure which makes it very simple to provide configuration management capabilities for anything that VQL can represent.
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In the initial release of vProfile we support three major types of targets:
- VMS – A Virtualization Management Server such as the VMware vCenter product.
- Host – A physical Host running a hypervisor such as the VMware vSphere ESX or ESXi product.
- VM – A guest virtual machine running in a hypervisor
For any target (vCenter, Host, or VM) of configuration, some common capabilities are supported. The user Interface provides the ability to:
- Compare and visualize differences between targets, profiles, or both
- Manage Profiles for those targets
- Edit Masks for visualizing configuration differences
- Schedule changes to the configuration
For each of these major target types we support configuration visualization, baselines/profiles, scheduled & ad-hoc remediation, and extensive enterprise reporting…
By “configuration visualization” the company means an interesting heatmap like the following:
