BMC Software announced that customer adoption of its Business Service Management platform continues to escalate, in part because it provides customers with virtualization management solutions designed to simultaneously manage mission-critical applications across both virtual and physical IT environments.

Currently, only BMC delivers fully-integrated, native virtualization management solutions that unify the control and management of both environments into a single view. This ability allows customers to manage risk and ROI across the full lifecycle of virtual data centers, including both distributed and mainframe environments. Other vendor offerings have been limited to managing virtual machines, often without reference to ramifications that virtualization has on the processes and management of the larger infrastructure.

“To effectively operate and maintain your physical infrastructure, you need solutions that can manage all of your assets, a CMDB that supports them and an understanding of the relationships between them. Not surprisingly, these are the same requirements to effectively manage your virtual infrastructure,” said Mike Smith, Teranet’s director of data utility. “With BMC’s virtualization management solutions, we maintain control of our combined physical and virtual infrastructure so that we can enjoy the benefits that virtualization technologies provide.”

More and more companies, faced with the increasing costs of managing large physical IT environments, have been embracing the idea of data center virtualization. However, while virtualized IT environments clearly pose great potential benefits, they also present major hurdles that must be overcome. For example, IT organizations have realized that virtualization can add great complexity to already challenging IT environments, making implementation and management of both environments a daunting task. IT processes such as discovery, monitoring, problem resolution and change management must be adapted to properly understand and control both environments. Other significant barriers include virtualization sprawl, lack of unified controls and unpredictable service levels.

In addition, leading research firm Enterprise Management Associates has found that 98 percent of enterprises implementing virtualization do so using multiple platforms, technologies and vendors, only further adding to the complexity.1 As a result, organizations often blink, delaying full production-level virtualization and losing the extraordinary benefits of this highly strategic approach.

Through Business Service Management, BMC customers use identical, fully-integrated processes to manage both the physical and virtual infrastructure. BMC solutions control the full lifecycle of virtualized enterprise IT infrastructure and services – from planning and configuration to ongoing management – across a broad range of virtual and physical technologies, platforms and vendors. By optimizing operations for both physical and virtual infrastructure, IT organizations can leverage virtualization to roll out new services and respond quickly to changing business needs.

“Our data center faced significant challenges requiring an excessive use of time, money and resources. We recognized that the development of a virtualization strategy was essential to improve business resiliency within our organization,” said Al Johnson, director of IT operations, Williams Companies. “BMC’s BSM expertise across both physical and virtual environments helped us improve our process capabilities and governance, reduce costs and create a more reliable, efficient and environmentally responsible IT infrastructure.”

BMC virtualization management solutions support a robust BSM approach that employs strong process and control methodology based on widely-adopted industry frameworks, such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). Additionally, BMC’s recent acquisition of BladeLogic extends the capability to manage the configuration of both physical and virtual environments including the ability to provision new virtual infrastructure, manage configuration change control, migrate applications across environments and ensure compliance with security, operational and regulatory requirements.

BMC virtualization management solutions are based on BMC Atrium, the service-enabling architecture that provides the foundation for BSM. Out-of-the-box integration with the BMC Atrium CMDB simplifies and speeds deployment allowing organizations to take an incremental, building-block approach to BSM.