Tripwire the data center compliance and infrastructure management software company whose virtualization arm of the company brought us the useful VMware VI/ESX OpsCheck and ConfigCheck tools has released a new virtualization management tool, called vWire.

vWire integrates change and configuration awareness into VMWare’s Virtual Infrastructure and vSphere environments and is the first product on the market to do so.

“With vWire you monitor the health of your virtual infrastructure, correlate this information to provide context and insight into potential issues, and act to prevent and resolve problems.”

vWire integrates nicely into Virtual Infrastructure client (VI Client) via a plug-in and provides an ‘at-a-glance’ dashboard.

You can break vWire down into offering three distinct areas of functionality which together ensure a proactive approach to the management of your VMware VI or vSphere environment:

MONITOR – vWire continuously monitors your virtual infrastructure providing the level of visibility usually only found when monitoring a physical server environment.  I should point out that vWire can alert you to a handful of important critical events that are not always easily visible from within vCenter Server.

• LUN path failures
• SCSI or HBA resets
• Network link failures
• Inaccessible LUNs
• HA failover events
• VMs failing to power on

CORRELATE – The event data  that vWire gathers from your virtual infrastructure is correlated with change and configuration data to provide you with a clear and understandable picture of what is happening within this infrastructure.  *Note: expect to see performance data included in an upcoming release.

ACT – This final step allows you to ‘act’ upon particular events that may occur.  This could be by performing remediation action using PowerShell scripts either manually or via a pre-defined automated response rule.  Automated alerts containing recommend action can also be configured.

Once installed there are multiple ways of accessing the data that vWire pulls together either through filters, scripts, alerts or via the web interface.  The web interface from my personal experience in using it so far has proven to be clear, well laid out and easy to follow.

One nice touch is the way that you can access the Technical and Support forum and Knowledge Base pages from inside the application itself which saves flicking between the application and a web browser.  Nice integration.

For those of you administering either a 3.5 (VI)  or 4.0 (vSphere) virtualized environment then I recommend checking out this useful virtualization management product.   There is a demo available free for download here.

For more information check out the main vWire site here or have a look at one of the links below.

Useful Links:

vWire Community Page

vWire Technical and Support Forum

vWire Knowledge Base

vWire Data Sheet

vWire Podcasts

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