CA's Integrates ASM Platform With VMware OS

CA Inc. (Nasdaq: CA) has announced that its Advanced Systems Management (ASM) platform is now integrated with VMware's Virtual Data Center Operating System product suite, announced last September at VMworld in Las Vegas.

The Virtual Data Center Operating System is a suite of products to manage data center resources through a virtualization layer. It includes elements of VMware's Infrastructure 3 products, such as vMotion for moving live virtual machines to different physical servers. It also includes VMware HA, or High Availability, and VMware Consolidated Backup. Fault-tolerance and data-recovery products are slated for future delivery, along with vCloud management and services.

Advanced Systems Management is CA's vendor-neutral systems management platform that can discover, configure, track, and monitor both virtual and physical resources. By managing both sets of resources, CA's ASM can deal with them as one combined set of data center assets. It can optimize operation of VMware ESX Server VMs, following policies laid down by IT managers and enforced by the ASM's rules engine.

ASM is tied to the CA Configuration Management Database and is able to pull out previous configuration patterns and apply the appropriate one to a request for a virtual machine. CA announced the combined Advanced Systems Management product on Oct. 6.

The goal of ASM is to take some of the manual labor out of configuring systems and allow them to be constructed on a more automated basis, according to Stephen Elliot, CA's VP of strategy for infrastructure management, at the time of the announcement.CA announced that CA ASM was "VMware ready" as the Virtualization Conference and Expo got under way this week in New York. CA is a sponsor of the conference. CA seeks to remain a virtualization vendor-neutral supplier of systems management as VMware, Citrix Systems, and Microsoft contend as hypervisor suppliers to the data center.

CA's systems management reach includes an ability to see and manage VMs on Sun Microsystems servers and IBM mainframes as well x86 servers, Elliot said in an earlier interview.

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