VitalQIP
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VitalQIP is an IP Address Management (IPAM) software product produced by Alcatel-Lucent.
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[edit] Description
VitalQIP essentially replaces all the Excel spreadsheets that people typically use to keep track of their IP subnets and address space allocations. Once the IP subnet allocations have been made they can be populated with static and dynamic address allocations, which then populate the DNS and DHCP services, thus ensuring a completely integrated approach to IP address and name management.
[edit] History
Originally released in the mid 1990's by Quadritek Systems (who were later acquired by Lucent Technologies), V3.0 of the product was the first major version that was commercially available to end-users, and beat many other IPAM products to market enabling a market leading position to be built up that still exists today (with some 40% market share).
Initially utilising a 3rd party DHCP server (called JOIN from Competitive Automation), and a BIND V4 based DNS server the product suffered from a multitude of bugs and usability issues. However the product improved rapidly after the Lucent acquisition as more resources were available to fund ongoing development.
V4.0 was released around 1998 to provide Year 2000 compliance to major corporate customers and also saw the introduction of a completely revamped GUI. During V4.0's lifespan, Lucent acquired Quadritek and the product was rebranded during a service pack release. Further improvements included Lucent's own DHCP server which resolved various licensing issues with the JOIN server and support for Oracle databases.
V5.0 improved on the GUI further, introduced DHCP failover and improved platform support.
V6.0 introduced a more efficient communications architecture, removing many bottlenecks from the DNS zone file generation process and introduced BIND V9 support. V6.1 and V6.2 included updated platform support, various incremental updates, enhanced security and management of AD integrated secure zones on MS DNS platforms.
V7.0 is the latest release and includes a new web interface, support for internationalisation and IPv6 support.
[edit] Features
This is just a very small list of some of the features the product supports:
Sybase or Oracle database support
Support for ISC (Internet Systems Consortium) BIND 9.x and Lucent's own version of BIND 9.
Support for Microsoft DNS and DHCP servers.
Lucent's DHCP server supports failover and has been stress tested to over 100,000 leases per minute.
Ability to manage thousands of forward and reverse zones, including full delegation (and classless reverse zone delegation - RFC 2317).
The product is extremely scalable with millions of IP addresses and hundreds of thousands of subnets able to be managed (although licensing does become an issue at this level).
Support for Windows 2003, Solaris 9/10 and RedHat Linux ES 4 platforms (older versions also supported HP-UX and AIX).
Comprehensive support is available directly from Lucent Technologies or through a network of international resellers, some of whom have started to produce products that integrate with VitalQIP, such as n3k's runIP DNS/DHCP appliance solution (available from n3k Informatik [1]) and InfoBlox's DNSOne appliance (available from InfoBlox [2]).
The product is used by many large corporates in the telecoms, finance and manufacturing industries. Some of these companies manage hundreds of DNS servers with the product and have a complex administration model that allows them to delegate management of various parts of the IP address space to different teams.
[edit] References
Alcatel-Lucent VitalQIP production description [3]
[edit] Further reading
IPAM Microsite [4]
IPAM Product Review at NetworkWorld [5]
IPAM Product Review from Network Testing Labs [6]
Current Analysis Special Report: "Best Practices in DNS/DHCP and IP Address Management [7]
Nemertes Research Special Report: "Best Practices for Securing Your IP Address Management Infrastructure" [8]
