vProfile
vProfile Configuration Management
Reflex vProfile configuration management enables IT managers to visually map configuration variances in their virtual infrastructure and enforce compliance with internal or external configuration standards.
As a fully integrated component of the Reflex Virtualization Management Center, vProfile provides a highly flexible framework for IT teams who aim to scale the virtual infrastructure while ensuring consistent configuration, meeting compliance and audit requirements and implementing IT automation for management tasks.
vProfile configuration management benefits enable enterprises to:
- Ensure consistent configuration across the virtual infrastructure
- Quickly scale virtualization deployments while maintaining compliance and audit requirements
- Automate IT management tasks to reduce IT complexity and labor costs
- Reduce OPEX costs that tend to increase due to inefficient management of growing virtualization implementations
With vProfile configuration management, Reflex customers can see their virtual infrastructure visually expressed as a "heatmap" enabling them to quickly identify configuration differences, remediate as needed and set configuration baselines.
vProfile Configuration Management Key Features
- Ability to Specify and Apply Baseline Profile Configuration — By establishing baselines within vProfile, users can create and apply profiles against other Hosts, VMs, or virtual management systems like VMware's vCenter in an environment, enabling administrators to ensure profiles are fully propagated
- Difference Visualization: Heatmaps and Customized Pivot Tables — Reflex vProfile configuration management plots VM configuration changes according to a graphical "heatmap" interface that uses a color schema to signify disparities; the more configuration differences there are the "hotter" a particular area of the map shows the differences. In addition, users can also leverage customized pivot tables to cross tabulate and summarize configuration information to matrix different combinations of properties
- Remediation
- Ad-Hoc Remediation — Administrators can select objects from the graphical heatmap, quickly identify differences or compare against the baseline profile, and in one click, apply changes to the objects being compared
- Scheduled Remediation — Administrators can set a scheduled remediation time to apply profiles during a maintenance window. vProfile also provides a remediation preview that enables users to review the scheduled remediation to see what will be effected before applying the profiles
- "Any to Any" Comparison — Reflex vProfile configuration management allows administrators to automatically compare any profile, Host, virtual machine or vCenter to another like property, providing administrators with a powerful diagnostic tool to not only track variations in a given environment but actually understand the differences
- Tiered Configuration Profiles — vProfile enables users to set, apply and manage multiple profiles per object (VM, Host, vCenter) to support shared policy throughout the virtual infrastructure to include security profiles, storage profiles, network profiles, etc
- Historical Profile Definition — If a VM, Host or vCenter is configured incorrectly or is just not maintained, users can select or create a profile from a previous date/time when the system in question was functioning correctly to reset the configuration profile. Historical profiles can be assigned to any object within the virtual environment
- Batch Modification — Reflex vProfile provides the ability to quickly make mass updates throughout the entire infrastructure across global, multi-site data centers. For example, if an administrator wants to move the storage for 100 virtual machines, he can create a new VM profile by just setting the new storage configurations and scheduling the remediation to apply this new profile during a maintenance period. vProfile will automatically instrument the updated storage profile in parallel for all 100 VMs
- VQL Expression Queries — Reflex's patent-pending virtualization query language powers vProfile as well as the other components of VMC. Configuration profiles are based on VQL objects and the VQL language is used as the dynamic binding between profiles and the target of configuration change. This enables administrators to add and remove resources in their virtualized data centers without having to manually maintain their configuration baselines. VQL wizards are also provided so that users are not required to learn the details of the VQL language
- Executive Reports — vProfile provides a plethora of standard compliance & audit reports that show when Hosts, VMs or vCenters are out of compliance or differ from the set baseline so administrators can focus other tasks and be proactively notified with the highest priority configuration problems
- IP Pool Allocation — vProfile enables users to allocate IP addresses from a pool rather than manual allocation for configuration properties such as vMotion and Fault Tolerance network interfaces. This provides a greater level of automation by eliminating custom scripting and maintenance of numerous scripts
