In March VMware acquired a number of products from its parent company EMC for $200M, all parts of the Ionix infrastructure management portfolio, and all coming from acquisitions of small technology firms happened between 2006 and 2009.
In July some of these products have been rebranded and relaunched so that Application Discovery Manager (acquired from nLayers in June 2006) has been renamed in vCenter Application Discovery Manager (ADM).
As the name suggests, vCenter ADM is an interesting product that automatically, in real-time and without agents, discovers applications and maps their dependency by analyzing the network traffic and recognizing specific software patterns.
In a large, complex data center this is extremely useful to perform change and configuration management, or to speed up infrastructure troubleshooting.
In a cloud computing environment, ADM could be leveraged to automatically update a content catalog.
EMC used to ship this product as a physical appliance, using an IBM 3250 System x server, but in mid August VMware released vCenter ADM 6.1 (build 6060), which introduces the virtual appliance version.
Other new capabilities of ADM 6.1 are:
- support for the Windows Collector component part of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2
- support for SFTP file transfer for ERDB synchronization
- support for Internet Explorer 6 and later versions