virtualization.info Editors

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.

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Last week VKernel released the second version of its Capacity Management Suite (CMS), a solution that integrates most of the company products.

Specifically, CMS 2.0 includes Capacity Analyzer 5.0, Chargeback 2.0 and the Optimization Pack 2.0, which includes the tools Wastefinder, Rightsizer and Inventory.
Inventory was not included into CMS 1.0 so this is a welcome addition.

Compared to the previous version, this is not just a commercial bundle: VKernel merged all the products above in a single virtual appliance, unified the analytics engine across the board and provided a single management console.
Despite that, licensing remains per-product, so that customers have a modular solution. Pricing starts at $299 per socket.

CMS 2.0 introduces a remarkable number of new features:

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Earlier this week the US startup Virtual Computer announced the availability of NxTop 3.0.
Like Neocleus (just acquired by Intel), Virtual Computer pioneered the use of a client hypervisor to enhance the enterprise desktop management. While Neocleus focused on platform security, Virtual Computer focused on virtual machines software and user management.

The solution includes two tiers: NxTop Center and the actual client hypervisor, NxTop Client.
The marketing investment made by Citrix to promote the upcoming XenClient, and the now-postponed launch of VMware Client Virtualization Platform (CVP), helped to increase a lot the attention for NxTop. So Virtual Computer recently decided to offer a scaled down free version of its platform.
Such free version of NxTop still required the centralized management component, but the interest for a client hypervisor from system administrators pushed the startup to release the NxTop Client as a stand-alone, completely free product: NxTop Workstation.

So the biggest part of NxTop 3.0 is the first, free, general purpose client hypervisor on the market. And quite remarkably, it doesn’t require the Intel vPro technology at all.

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VMTurbo is a new virtualization startup that left the stealth mode in April. 
The company’s technologies was previewed in July, but only last week the actual products were announced and released.

As virtualization.info previously reported, the VMTurbo platform is made of many different modules, to monitor, plan, automate and report about the management of a virtual infrastructure.
The first two pieces of the suite are called Monitor and Host Reporter. Both are available now and come as part of the same virtual appliance.

Monitor, completely free of charge, lists the virtual machines and hosts health status and provides real-time metrics about vCPUs, vRAM, vNICs and vHDs, detecting resources bottlenecks:

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Last week the Canadian startup Embotics released version 3.6 of its VM lifecycle management solution V-Commander. Version 3.0 went out almost exactly one year ago, without groundbreaking new features. But this new V-Commander 3.6 introduces a couple of very interesting additions:

• capacity management
• self-service provisioning web portal

The company claims that this version of the product scales up to 15,000 virtual machines and that the ROI comes after just four months.

Interestingly, Embotics also announced the upcoming support for Microsoft Hyper-V.

Earlier this week RingCube announced the availability of its platform wrapper vDesk 3.1.

vDesk, the enterprise version of MojoPac launched in March, features an interesting hybrid architecture which doesn’t use hardware virtualization but acts like other products in that market segment, including VMware ACE, Microsoft MED-V and MokaFive Virtual Desktop Solution.

Version 3.1 introduces a few new security-oriented and synchronization features:

• pre-authentication host checking
• granular logging (for regulation compliance)
• virtual environments compression before synchronization
• block-level differencing

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In the last four years PHD Virtual (formerly PHD Technologies) has been solely focused on the VMware market, competing with larger companies like Quest/Vizioncore and Veeam. But in early 2010 the startup decided to extend its support to other virtual infrastructures. This led to an investment from Citrix in May, and to the release of Backup for Citrix XenServer 1.0 last week.

The new product offers the same look & feel of the VMware version but the feature-set is not completely aligned yet.
PHD Virtual clarified to virtualization.info that this doesn’t depend on any technical constrain or lack of R&D resources: simply, the company delivered the XenSource version as soon as possible and so had to prioritize the delivery of certain capabilities. 
In the coming months, the two version will share exactly the same capabilities.

The company published a video of the new product in action:

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In March 2009, VMware signed an agreement with Neverfail to use its technology for vCenter fail-over.
Called vCenter Server Heartbeat, the product impacted the business of other VMware’s partners, including Double-Take, SteelEye and CA.

Earlier this week Neverfail announced that the OEM agreement with VMware has been renewed. vSphere 4.1 in fact includes vCenter Server Heartbeat 6.3, which ships with the new Continuous Availability Director.
The new module is a centralized management console to view the status of multiple vCenter Servers and their associated back-end databases.

Interestingly, Neverfail reports that more 500 customers adopted the solutions since early 2009. It seems a pretty low number considering that VMware has over 200,000 customers worldwide and most of them are enterprise ones.

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Earlier this week the application virtualization startup Spoon (formerly XenoCode) released the new major version of its platform: Studio 2011.

The new version primarily introduces support for 64bit virtualized applications, for Microsoft Windows 7 (32 and 64bit) and the .NET Framework 4.0.

Studio 2011 also comes with many new templates to simplify the package authoring of virtualized applications like Office 2010, Internet Explorer 8 or Google Chrome 6.

Quite interestingly, the company is pitching the product directly against the just released ThinApp 4.6, highlighting how the VMware’s application virtualization platform is still lacking many of the features offered by Studio.

Last week the network monitoring and management company SolarWinds announced its second free tool for VMware administrators: VM Console.

The first one, VM Monitor, monitors ESX hosts health, providing statistics about the virtual machines state (vCPUs, vRAM, vNICs) and best practices thresholds to recognize performance degradation.

This new product instead allows administrators to view, search for, take a snapshot, shutdown and restart the VMs without any interaction with vCenter.

SolarWinds published a video to demonstrate the product in action:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtGyBn6WYEE[/youtube]

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.