Last March we reviewed ScienceLogic in our Real World Labs and while we really liked the product, we pointed out a few areas of improvement. Their developers were listening! In version 5.1, ScienceLogic addressed our issues and also released a host of compelling features around VMWare management that may launch it to the top of the pack in consolidated Enterprise management products.

Most interesting in the release are a number of components to manage virtualized environments. Using Dynamic Applications built for VMWare, EM7 reports information on the VMWare ESX Server, hypervisor, and any Virtual Machines running a guest OS. This version also expands upon this foundation to provide better visualization of the entire virtualized environment and the relationships between virtualization infrastructure components. This includes auto alerts for individual virtual machine migration to composite graphs showing the health of multiple virtual machines.

While only VMWare is supported currently, EM7 provides event correlation and alarm suppression for virtual machines running on a VMWare ESX Server and Automated Virtual Machine Discovery. Also supported is a VMWare Infrastructure map, showing relationships between virtual machines and VMWare ESX Server. This can be extremely useful in making the VM promise an operational reality.

EM7 also includes two sets of virtualization management reports. The first for planning, both pre-virtualization planning and post-deployment for ongoing capacity/utilization and additional implementation planning. The other set of reports is around daily operational management of the environment.

Keep on eye on EM7!