Review: Reflex Virtualization Management Center

So why doesn't someone come up with a unified approach to managing configuration, security, deployment and monitoring? It should be easy. After all, in a virtual environment we can spin up a management server with little effort and almost no cost. As it turns out, it's not quite a walk in the park, but, like a virtuoso musician who 'makes it all look so easy', the clean simplicity of VMC's deployment is deceptive. 

A lot of thought clearly went into this product. VMC takes advantage of the nature of a virtual data centre. Part of that nature is that there is a lot of data moving on the virtual network. That data tells us all about the environment - and if one can just collect and analyse all of that streaming data, it can be managed, and that is exactly what VMC does.

Some of the product's capabilities seem to flow naturally from the straightforward analysis. For example, if one is seeing all of the data in the enterprise, it follows that the user should be able to understand how the system is behaving. That, logically, includes capacity measurement, security and other types of monitoring. VMC can handle monitoring, performance and capacity, security and configuration management, all behind a single pane of glass. 

It addresses several management tasks of critical virtual systems in a unified manner, so VMC is ideal for dealing with regulatory compliance and reporting issues. The product does this by taking the data it collects and using it to model the enterprise. Once the model is built, it can be kept current and include such things as topology maps of the virtual enterprise. Drill-down into the topology reveals configuration and performance measurements.

Reflex VMC is straightforward to deploy and configure. It is well supported by Reflex and brings a much easier paradigm to the management of virtual environments, no matter what hypervisor one is using. Pricing can be a bit complicated, so contact Reflex for more details in that regard. Overall, this is a top-drawer tool and, given that there is far more to talk about than I can fit in the space allotted, if you work in a virtual environment, this is one you really need to look at.