CA Technologies is buying a specialist in building capacity management software to bolster CA's ability to manage virtualized environments. The move also broadens CA's announced direction of providing the tools to build and manage internal cloud environments.

Hyperformix is an Austin, Texas, firm that produces such products as Hyperformix Capacity Manager, Data Manager and Performance Optimizer. In their latest versions, they are designed to put a modern user interface on top of systems management information from other sources and apply it to virtual machine management. No price was named in the acquisition, announced Tuesday. The deal is expected to close by Dec. 31, the end of CA's third fiscal quarter.

Capacity management is a tougher goal to achieve in virtualized environments because of the many resources that are linked together and subdivided into logical or virtual entities. Some aspects of virtual machine operation, such as the amount of application, network or disk resources being used, can be difficult to see alongside intense server hardware utilization.

Peter Klante, CEO of Hyperformix, said capacity management is one of the hidden disciplines of realizing a return on a broad enterprise virtualization effort. "As a virtualization rollout progresses through the enterprise, insight and comprehensive planning are needed," he said in the acquisition announcement. VM "sprawl" often occurs as virtual machines proliferate and become lost from view, leading to needless consumption of resources.

Many companies have virtualized less than a third of the data center, noted Andi Mann, CA's VP of virtualization product marketing, in a blog today. "Hyperformix will give our customers sophisticated, real-time and predictive capacity management capabilities," wrote Mann, which allows them to further extend the amount of the data center that's been virtualized.

By providing visibility and control over virtualized resources, Hyperformix will help customers "see what VMs are in use, what they can shut down, and what capacity they need to overcome VM sprawl… without poring for hours over performance trending reports," he added.

CA's existing capacity management capabilities tend to be limited to "deployments we can control," Mann noted.

In addition to Hyperformix, CA has acquired 3Tera, Cassatt, NetQoS, Nimsoft and Oblicore to broaden its virtualization and private cloud management capabilities over the past 18 months.