This FOCUS Landscape Report provides an overall look at virtualization management requirements as well as the current vendor landscape addressing these requirements. It describes the factors that are driving the need for virtualization management capabilities, and defines the virtualization management areas that are required in order to achieve the promise of a cost-effective, efficient, and responsive IT organization, and to give IT a language in which to communicate management needs to vendors.

These areas include Virtual Machine (VM) Life Cycle Management and Provisioning, Capacity Management, Performance Management, Fault Management and Root Cause Analysis, Storage Management and Data Protection, and Security Management. Each area brings a set of requirements that IT must consider in order to develop a well-managed virtual infrastructure.

The report discusses how these different areas of management ought to be considered and the associated capabilities available for virtualized infrastructures, and explains why management of the virtual infrastructure is different from traditional IT management. In-depth feature matrices are included, covering the primary solutions available in each management category to aid in comparing solution functionality and breadth. A discussion around considerations for purchasing solutions is included along with an “at-a-glance” vendor solution analysis. The report concludes with a FOCUS assessment of the overall virtualization management market.

The Landscape Report covers products from the following vendors: Akorri, BlueStripe, BMC, CA, Catbird, CiRBA, Citrix, Double-Take, DynamicOps, Embotics, FalconStor, FastScale, Fortisphere, HP, Hyper9, IBM, Microsoft, Neptuny, NetApp, PlateSpin, Reflex Systems, Surgient, Symantec, Tek-Tools, Tripwire, Uptime Software, Vizioncore, VKernel, and VMware.