• Virtual Infrastructure Discovery & Mapping
• Change Management & Control
• Virtualization CMDB
• Dynamic Policy Enforcement
• Virtualization Security
• Virtualization Segmentation & Trust Zones
• Performance Monitoring
• Software Asset Management
• Application Services Discovery & Monitoring
• Alerts & Alarm Management
• Enterprise Reporting
• Third-party Integration
• Script Automation

To Script or Not to Script…That is the Question

The Answer: Script Automation. Sensing changes in the physical data center, evaluating those changes and taking a pre-determined action as a result of the change is almost impossible. As the adoption of virtualization continues to increase exponentially, the next generation virtualized data center now provides this type of unprecedented control and automation of scripting. This significantly increases the efficiency of human IT resources managing the virtual infrastructure.

Reflex helps organizations automate many of the repetitive processes that are necessary to manage and secure the virtual infrastructure day-to-day. The VMC user interface is easily customized with small scripts that have complete access to the entire virtualization API and the Reflex vCMDB. By combining Reflex's core capabilities to track events, configuration changes and security alerts, users are able to automatically run scripts whenever certain correlated conditions are met within the virtual environment. Furthermore, virtualization administrators are able to write comprehensive policy with automated enforcement. The use of the VMware python API, and soon Power Shell, translates to limitless possibilities for automation and policy enforcement in virtual environments.

The Reflex scripting library includes a python interface to the entire VI Java library. This allows an administrator the full breadth of the vSphere API from a scripting interface embedded within the Reflex VMC. In addition, the Reflex VMC also provides the ability to easily extend the scripting library. By simply dropping a new script library onto the file system, the user can use the functions provided in the 3^rd party library within their scripts.

Script Automation example:
Using Reflex's domain specific query language, VQL, a condition is set that looks for a disconnected host event. When that event is detected, a python script will run that adds a new alert into the Reflex virtualization management center and sends an email to the administrator to notify them of the event.