Last week Quest announced three new products, Cloud Automation Platform 7.5, vFoglight 6.5 and vFoglight Storage 1.0, but just the last one is available right now.
vFoglight comes from the rebranding of the Vizioncore portfolio, completed at the end of August.
The last Vizioncore version of the product is 6.0, released in November 2009. The new 6.5 version introduces a number of new capabilities, including the much expected support for Microsoft Hyper-V, but it won’t be available before Q4 2010.
vFoglight Storage 1.0 leverages the Vizioncore monitoring engine and GUI to control the physical storage layer, providing details about the topology (relation between arrays and datastores) and performance of SAN arrays in the virtual infrastructure.
The product ships with pre-defined alerts and reports helpful to understand when the capacity thresholds are matched.
vFoglight Storage provides Latency, I/O / sec and MB / sec, number of read and writes as performance metrics, as well as size, used/committed and number/amount of entities as capacity metrics.
The data history is limited to just 30 days. Customers can expand that only by integrating the product with vFoglight.
First version of the product doesn’t support all kind of storage vendors. NetApp filers (both Fibre Channel and iSCSI), through the DataOnTap API, and EMC CLARiiON CX3 and CX4 SANs (both Fibre Channel and iSCSI) are supported.
During the whole 2011 Quest will extend support to HP, Dell, IBM, Hitachi and other EMC SANs.
Support for fabric switches is limited too: only Brocade and Cisco Fibre Channel switches are supported right now.
Quite interestingly, while the product can be installed on any VMware virtual machine, Quest recommends to run it on physical hosts when it has to monitor large virtual infrastructures (e.g.: 4 clusters with 6 ESX hosts each).
Quest sells vFoglight Storage at $499 per CPU socket.