Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has updated its Network Node Manager i (NNMi) to include network management and visualization for virtual networks.

While HPE announced version 10.10 of NNMi on Monday, it took the wraps off it earlier this month during its HPE Discover conference in London. HPE director of product management Balaji Venkatraman says NNMi is designed to help customers, which include enterprises, cloud providers, and service providers, gain insight into virtualized devices and topologies across their physical or virtual networks.

In the hypervisor environment, Venkatraman says that NNMi can monitor fault performance, track where virtual machines are running on a network and which hosts they are using, and identify Layers 2-3 connectivity. For service providers, NNMi can provide the fault and performance management capability for the network functions virtualization (NFV) infrastructure of the ETSI framework.

“We’re helping our customers make the transition to a virtualized network infrastructure,” Venkatraman says. “For those that are already there, we’re helping them monitor, manage, and ensure that they can deliver services in a reliable manner.”

The NNMi tool can track how virtual machines are moving — whether due to a cloud burst or an increase in compute or network capabilities — in a single data center or multiple data centers in order to monitor the performance management requirements for the customer on that particular network function.

For example, if a switch goes down and causes availability degradation on a set of virtual machines (VMs) that are connected to that switch, NNMi helps customers identify where those VMs are running. It also identifies the services the VMs are providing, and their Layer 2 or Layer 3 connectivity.

“Most importantly, once we know a switch has had some problems, we can quickly locate that and help our customers figure out how they can bring back that switch,” Venkatraman says.

In addition to HPE, Venkatraman says that CA Technologies, IBM, and EMC are the leaders in the network management marketplace.

“Among those four, we clearly are the leaders both in terms of installed based and adoption of virtualization technology,” he says. “We’re also seeing niche players like Pluribus Networks, and VMware has its own support for ESX and their NSX. We’re working with Cisco ACI and we’re partnering with the NSX folks to better support their infrastructures.”

Venkatraman says that while there are a lot of point products from competitors, “we really don’t see a strong competitor focused on the network management solution from fault performance feeding up into the OSS infrastructure of a service provider.”