Hoping to build on the success of VMware’s vCloud initiative, configuration control specialist Tripwire today announced a new tool to help manage virtual server environments running VMware ESX Server. Tripwire’s new vWire tool can either be used as a standalone console or as a plug-in that provides a new tab within the VMware vServer client environment.
Schoenbaum: vWire handles monitoring and remediation
Linux system administrators may already be familiar with Tripwire, which has a 12 year history making tools to monitor Linux configuration files and alert administrators of changes.
Dan Schoenbaum, Tripwire chief operating officer, said, “Beta testers say vWire gives them visibility into their virtual environments that they don’t have today. We correlate configuration data, data from log files and event data and draw from that meaningful conclusions.”
A subsequent release of vWire will add the ability to monitor performance data from VMware APIs and ESX Server log files.
As well as giving administrators an early warning about trouble spots in their environments, vWire could also help with remediation. “vWire has the ability to act using Microsoft PowerShell,” Schoenbaum added.
For example, vWire comes with a search filter that identifies VMs that have snapshots older than one week or 30 days. Such snapshots could be a problem if the associated delta files have grown too large. Having identified problem VMs, the filter can email information to an administrator so they can take appropriate action.
This type of built in intelligence could be one of the most useful aspects of this kind of product. However, Schoenbaum said vWire is capable of even more. “We not only building a product. We’re also building a community so users can guide us on what matters most to them. We’re building a community portal so users can share content, such as PowerShell scripts and filters.” So a user might develop a script that shows VMs with a CDRom attached because this configuration cannot be VMotioned. Provided the user shared that script it would be available for other users.
An evaluation version of vWire is available for download today, and the suite can be bought online at an introductory price of $295 per server CPU. In additional there’s an annual maintenance fee of 18 percent.