Egenera is mostly known as a hardware vendor offering its own blade system, BladeFrame, but the most interesting proposition of the company is its management console: PAN Manager.
This software layer is able to aggregate the hardware resources of each blade and abstract them in a sort of computing cloud in a box.
For a long time Egenera tightened PAN Manager to the BladeFrame, making it almost unknown for the wide audience. But more than one year ago, Egenera finally allowed to use the software on other hardware provided by a number of OEM partners.
The resource pool provided by PAN Manager is a perfect companion for a virtualization engine so the company developed a special module called vBlade, which allows a hypervisor to manage the abstracted hardware.
Rather than develop (or acquire) its own virtual machine monitor, Egenera preferred to sign an agreement with XenSource to adopt its XenEnterprise.
Now, thirteen months after opening PAN Manager, Egenera is taking further steps to make its strategy more virtualization-friendly: the new vBlade 2.1 is renamed vmBuilder and it’s shipped with Citrix XenServer 4.1.
This introduces much wanted features to the platform like XenMotion, virtual machines suspend and resume and support for Red Hat Enteprise Linux 64bit as guest OS.
Additionally Egenera may bring VMware ESX on vmBuilder, as announced a long time ago.