Fortisphere FAQs

Who is Fortisphere?

Fortisphere is a leading provider of Virtual Machine Lifecycle Management software that provides cradle-to-grave identification, tracking, reporting, and management of online and offline virtual machines. Founded in October 2006, Fortisphere delivers unprecedented visibility and control that enables enterprises to manage the growth of virtualized environments while preventing unwieldy proliferation and maintaining infrastructure flexibility. This is what we call Smart Growth™ – an intelligent, controlled approach to achieving sustainable virtual machine growth.

Fortisphere is a venture-backed company, headquartered in the greater Washington, DC area, with offices in Chantilly, VA, Glenwood, MD, and Boston, MA.

What products do you offer?

The Virtual Essentials™ suite of lifecycle management products provides cradle-to-grave identification, tracking, reporting, and management of online and offline virtual machines. The suite currently consists of two products:

Virtual Insight™ is an operational lifecycle management product that enables enterprises to inspect, tag, track, and report upon all virtual machines as they move throughout preproduction and production environments. With key features such as configuration introspection, Virtual Lineage™, and virtual machine tagging, enterprises can obtain the operational context required to confidently roll out a virtual infrastructure that is known, well-managed, and secure.

Virtual Foresight™ is a lifecycle policy management product that delivers out-of-the-box, best-practice policies designed to achieve Smart Growth – an intelligent, controlled approach to delivering sustainable growth of virtual machines. With key features such as virtual machine network access control, virtual time to live, virtual anti-affinity, rogue machine and theft prevention, enterprises now can leverage out-of-the-box polices of industry best practices to manage the multitude of virtual machines running on desktops, workstations, servers, and hypervisors.

Do you offer cross-platform support?

Yes, we have a multi-vendor approach. Our products support VMware, Microsoft and Red Hat.

Are your products created specifically for VMs?

Our technology was purpose built for virtualized servers and workstations. Our goal was to provide a common technology platform that delivers the same solution across servers, workstations, and desktops.

Are you an agent?

No, we actually have developed a transparent, state of the art drivers embedded within each virtual machine guest OS. This provides several benefits:

• Fortisphere's driver technology will uniquely allow for dynamic updates and patches of the Fortisphere technology directly with no system impact.
• The ability to have full access to the system for purview and control of all system resources and communication.
• Protection from tampering and reverse engineering as well as removal or halting of the technology, unlike an agent.
• The driver is a nominal footprint when compared to an application layer agent

Why are you inside the VM OS? What does that allow you to do that others can’t?

Primarily it allows us to deliver greater visibility and control as well as travel with the VM as it dynamically moves throughout its lifecycle. Being in the VM allows us to fingerprint the system by performing full OS introspections of everything within the container. Living in the VM also provides the ability to deliver data attributes to the driver that acts as custom tagging for the business that can then be used within the inventory, visualization, and reporting components of the product. Being embedded in the VM allows deeper introspection providing visibility into everything occurring within the VM and provides a critical control point for our granular and diverse set of operational and security policies.

What is Smart Growth™?

Fortisphere defines Smart Growth as an intelligent, controlled approach to achieving sustainable virtual machine growth. The Fortisphere Virtual Essential suite delivers unprecedented visibility and control that enables enterprises to manage the growth of virtualized environments while preventing unwieldy proliferation and maintaining infrastructure flexibility – thereby achieving Smart Growth.

• Administrators can easily isolate all virtual machines running the same application, owned by the same functional owner, of equal trust level, of equal patch level, and other attributes.
• The parent virtual machine, its siblings, and any of its clones are easily identified.
• Every virtual machine is present and accounted for at all times, no infiltrators exist, and theft is not an option.

• Temporary test machines are decommissioned promptly.
• Co-mingling of machines and inter-VM communication on the same hypervisor is directed through policies.

• The workings of the virtual environment do not remain a black box to all who use it – key reports, status, and metrics are well communicated.