Tripwire betters VMware with new tool

Management specialist Tripwire has launched a virtualisation management product aimed at VMware users looking for a more sophisticated tool than those offered by the vendor's own software.

Tripwire has launched vWire to meet the growing requirement for virtualisation products, claiming it to be the first product that integrates change and configuration awareness into virtual infrastructure management. vWire works by continuously monitors the state of virtual systems and correlates data with critical events to provide context and insight into potential issues, and then acts to prevent and resolve problems that cause downtime.

Dwayne Melançon, Tripwire's vice president for corporate and business Development, said that although Vmware already had the range of tools to offer users some degree of management but "there's a large range of tools to deal with, rather than a single product. Not only that; when you do get some information from those tools, it's often buried in obscure log files,that are themselves not so easy to find."

Melançon said that to gather information as to what was needed for a virtualisation product, the company took soundings for a wide range of virtualisation professionals, both users and consultants, to find out what sort of tools were missing in existing products. He said that the user acceptance was a key driver for Tripwire in getting the product developed.

"We've established an online community that will enable users to exchange ideas, troubleshoot problems and even exchange scripts." Melançon drew parallels with SolarWinds, a company that has built a strong presence in the network management market through the use of an online community. "We can't always be the smartest guy in the room," Melançon said, "but we can get help from the smartest guy in the room."

Besides the community, there are two other essential parts of vWire. Firstly, the monitoring and data collection component that monitors all event data, compiling a database of information that's constantly updated. Secondly, the shared data element means that the data can be accessed easily by using the vWire dashboard. Melançon said that a major element of this was the support for Microsoft's PowerShell scripting language.

vWire is available immediately and will initially work with VMware alone - although Melançon said that the company was looking at supporting Hyper-V too.