BMC Software announced a comprehensive virtualization management approach, including nine new, integrated solutions specifically designed to help customers eliminate the rising risk and operational expenses associated with inadequate management of virtualized IT environments.

The new solutions are grounded in a BMC-invented, highly automated set of Closed-Loop Change and Configuration Management (CLCCM) process workflows that reduce the latency, cost and risk associated with change management by as much as 75 percent.

"Virtualization is being widely adopted as a key technology for reducing IT capital costs through consolidation, as well as for empowering IT with agility and flexibility to meet rapidly changing business needs," said Tim Grieser, vice president for System Management Software at highly regarded analyst firm IDC. "However, to be effective, virtualization must be managed and controlled -- otherwise it can cause more problems than it solves."

Establishing a new standing in enterprise management, BMC virtualization management solutions give customers an holistic, unified approach to IT planning, control, automation and management for today's virtualized, multi-vendor IT environments. What's more, BMC delivers these capabilities while maintaining the business agility promised by virtualization.

"Our competitors continue to focus on the hardware aspects of virtualization. That's understandable when you're primarily a hardware company, but it nevertheless still misses the customer's real issue," said Kia Behnia, chief technology officer for BMC's Enterprise Service Management business unit. "From a software standpoint, they offer little more than reactive monitoring of individual virtual machines (VMs). Their products file an alert when a major business service outage has already occurred, which is a little late. In contrast, BMC's comprehensive solutions proactively manage the entire physical and virtual infrastructure (VI) with solutions that prevent business service outages, improving customer satisfaction while driving down costs."

BMC has extended its Service Assurance and Service Automation portfolios -- key components of its leading Business Service Management (BSM) platform -- to deliver virtualization-specific capabilities. The nine new offerings have been optimized to support goals for performance, compliance and enterprise visibility by addressing some of the most pressing challenges created by virtualization:

• Getting Started Properly
• Simplifying Management
• Ensuring Availability
• Ensuring Performance
• Stopping Server Sprawl
• Ensuring Security
• Enforcing Compliance
• Reducing Administration Costs

All of these new offerings are architected to support both virtual and physical infrastructures, further reducing cost and complexity by allowing IT operations organizations to use a single set of management solutions across their entire IT infrastructure.

IDC's Tim Grieser added: "BMC's new solutions go to the heart of the virtualization management problem by addressing key requirements including unified physical and virtual management, full-stack management, discovery, provisioning, and performance management, together with significant automation capabilities based on the BladeLogic acquisition."

As part of this new virtualization management offering, BMC has completed full solution integration with long-time partners Microsoft, Sun and VMware.

"As organizations explore the many advantages virtualization offers, they also must understand that implementing these technologies cannot come at the price of sacrificing control of their environment," said Dai Vu, Microsoft's director of virtualization solutions. "BMC significantly extends the value of virtualization technologies like Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V by providing automation, integration and control across the heterogeneous enterprise. This very strong combination helps customers experience the benefits, flexibility and cost improvements provided by virtualization to a much greater extent than they otherwise would be able to."

Vijay Sarathy, Sun Microsystems' senior director of marketing for xVM, said: "Datacenter infrastructures are becoming increasingly diverse, posing new management challenges. BMC and Sun understand that customers place a real priority on strengthening IT manageability and driving operating expenses down. Building on our strategic partnership, BMC and Sun have been integrating Sun's open, flexible and internet-scale xVM virtualization portfolio with BMC's industry-leading Business Service Management solutions. The partnership between BMC and Sun provides customers with superior application environments that help customers to maximize the benefits of virtualization while maintaining control over their entire IT infrastructure."