Today VMware/SpringSource released the first update of Hyperic (formerly HQ) since the acquisition of SpringSource in August 2009.
Hyperic was an infrastructure management firm that offers products (HQ and IQ) for every major operating system (from Microsoft Windows to IBM AIX), every major application platform (from LAMP to Microsoft .NET) and every major enterprise service (from Microsoft Exchange to Oracle Database) on the market.
The Hyperic solution also monitors VMware and Citrix virtual infrastructures and the Amazon implementation of Xen.
For each supported product Hyperic can do a wide array of activities, from auto-discovery to real-time health monitoring, from capacity planning to event tracking and alerting, up to granular reporting.
SpringSource acquired Hyperic just three months before announcing the deal with VMware.
Easy to expect, the new version introduces a tighter integration with vSphere through a new plug-in for vCenter that uses built-in java plugin classes, the HQ API, and the vCenter SDK.
The vSphere plugin manages a hierarchy of vSphere resources, from vCenter, to vSphere hosts, to the VMs in the hosts, down to the HQ-managed software running in a VM. The plugin detects the hierarchy, so the vSphere resources automatically support hierarchical alerting – so that you do not need to configure dependency relationships yourself:
Hyperic 4.4 automatically discovers ESX hosts, virtual machines and guest operating systems within minutes of their launch, and presents them in a unified topology so users can see which application components are running on which ESX hosts… Additionally, Hyperic detects when virtual machines are moved from one ESX host to another using vMotion, and adjusts topologies accordingly.
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Hyperic 4.4 can distinguish between when a guest operating system has shut down unintentionally, and when it has been intentionally powered down or suspended. This prevents false alarms and enables system administrators to elastically scale their application infrastructure without triggering alert storms.
The new plugin, which supports also vSphere 4,.1, replaces the VMware Infrastructure Manager plugin available in previous versions of HQ.
Apparently, the support for XenServer is still there, even if it only supports version 4.x of the Citrix hypervisor.
Also, the open source version of Hyperic monitoring suite is still available.