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Vizioncore Updates Virtualization Management and Optimization Solutions

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Vizioncore today announced the general release of updates to two of its key products: vOptimizer Pro 2.2, Vizioncore’s storage and VM optimization tool, and vFoglight 5.2.6, an updated version of the company’s popular performance monitoring solution.

Vizioncore vOptimizer Pro 2.2 brings the ability to scan an organization’s VMware vCenter Server and ESX Hosts in order to determine the amount of over-allocated virtual storage that exists unnoticed. According to industry analysts, as much as 90% of storage in virtual infrastructure may be unused because of over allocations at the initial point of provisioning. vOptimizer Pro helps reclaim storage from across the data center to help increase utilization, reduce costs and improve performance.

Key features of the vOptimizer Pro 2.2 include:

  • Infrastructure Scanning – Locating and determining the amount of unused virtual storage across the virtual infrastructure enables the customer to see exactly how much storage is being wasted. Furthermore, the product can estimate the total potential savings gained from reclaiming wasted storage and generate a report for use within the business
  • Broader OS Support – vOptimizer Pro now includes full support for 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Microsoft Vista and Microsoft Windows 2008 giving customers the ability to reduce or defer storage acquisition costs across even more environments
  • Enhanced Browsing – Improved ability to select virtual environment targets to be scanned, making an easier task of space reclamation
  • VMware vSphere 4 Support – vOptimizer Pro 2.2 supports VMware’s latest virtual infrastructure

vFoglight is expanding in the areas of capacity planning to help optimize resource utilization and chargeback to help IT recover infrastructure costs.

The new features of vFoglight 5.2.6 include:

  • Capacity Planning – Determining the required infrastructure resources needed to support organizational growth and change is among the greatest challenges for VM administrators. To help combat this challenge, a new capacity planning module, included with vFoglight Pro, builds on the “Migration Modeler” to allow “What If ..?” scenarios for moving VMs to or from actual or hypothetical physical servers.
  • Measured Resource Utilization (Chargeback) – For customers who meter for the use of infrastructure, vFoglight includes Measured Resource Utilization (MRU). MRU is based on measured consumption of IT resources in the infrastructure and can, for instance, help IT understand which user, group or application is using physical servers or VMs.

With vFoglight, administrators can view their entire infrastructure through detailed architectural representations and use out-of-the-box alerts and expert advice to detect, diagnose and resolve problems affecting performance and availability. vFoglight also allows administrators to plan, manage and optimize infrastructure capacity for improved performance and better resource utilization. And for organizations that seek to recover costs for the use of infrastructure, vFoglight supports leading chargeback models to track infrastructure usage and costs. Finally, vFoglight integrates with existing tools and monitoring frameworks already in place helping organizations leverage existing investments.

Trial versions of vOptimizer Pro 2.2 and vFoglight (available in Standard or Pro editions) are available to download free here.

BlueBackUp Goes Virtual With Backup Product For ESX Environments

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BlueBackUp, a subsidiary of Oodrive Technologies, is enriching its focus on big company needs by offering an outsourced backup solution for virtual VMware ESX environments.

Thanks to its VMware ESX plug-in coupled with “Delta Block” technology, BlueBackUp is today proposing a complete protection solution for VMware environments. This offers hot backup possibilities in respect of critical applications (databases, etc.) and restoring an entire machine as well as a single file.

Main Features of the BlueBackUp Solution for Virtualised Environments

– Complete protection of the ESX environment: backup of the ESX server
and all its virtual machines in their entirety – applications, set-ups,
and so on and so forth.

– Hot backup of virtual machines: applications no longer have to be
stopped in order to start the backup. So there’s no activity slowdown.

– Restore granularity: possibility of restoring a virtual machine in its
entirety (OS, settings,…) or individual files (Exchange database,
SQL,…).

– Delta Block technology: only the blocks within the files that have been
altered since the last backup are sent in an encrypted and compressed
format, which seriously limits the bandwidth requirements.

– Automatic delocalisation of the backups (and images) to BlueBackUp’s
external storage servers.

Advantages for Companies Working with VMware:

– Fewer risks of data loss, thanks to the automatic delocalisation of
their virtual machines to top-security data centres.

– Less down time following a data loss, thanks to the restore procedures’
granularity.

– Fewer resources used for backup tasks, thanks to the Delta Block
technology, which prevents any deceleration of virtual environment
performance.

With this protection solution for ESX virtual servers, combined with its exclusive restore tools, BlueBackUp is reinforcing its determination to focus on big company needs and is clearly positioned as the specialist in terms of complex environmental backup.

Xtravirt Unveils Global Virtualization Capacity Assessment Service

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Xtravirt Limited, which runs a leading global virtualization knowledge portal, today announced the general availability of an online Capacity Assessment Service. The service allows customers to run on-demand capacity assessments of their environments, ensuring correct sizing of virtualization solutions for virtual desktop, server consolidation and data center transformation projects.

“Capacity planning is an essential component for any organisation wishing to adopt virtualisation; whether it be desktop replacement or a server consolidation exercise,” states Paul Davey, CTO of Xtravirt. “We have kept the whole process as simple as possible,” continues Paul. “Collected data, consisting of performance metrics, are securely uploaded to the Xtravirt VReady Portal, where they are analyzed to produce a summary VReady Assessment Report. This can be subsequently extended and we can quickly produce a comprehensive analysis, including full what-if scenarios, solution optimization and licensing calculations. If a client wishes to use a particular brand of server, or server SKU, they can let us know and we can feed it into the design.”

The Xtravirt VReady Portal freely allows customers to download a small data collector module (approximately 10 MB) and start collecting data immediately without agents, additional infrastructure or external consultants.

Double-Take Announces New Licensing And Pricing Model for Virtual Systems

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Double-Take Software today announced a new pricing and licensing model for Double-Take for Virtual Systems that enables customers to simply and cost-effectively protect an unlimited number of virtual machines under one license. The new model makes it easy for customers to deploy disaster recovery solutions based on VMware vSphere 4 by licensing at the hypervisor level, versus the guest virtual machine level, ultimately enabling customers to reap the rewards of server virtualization while delivering a recovery framework that keeps workloads available at all times.

The new licensing model aligns Double-Take for Virtual Systems with the deployment of VMware virtualization and no longer forces end-users to track and count individual workloads. More importantly, the licensing model offers a user-friendly and competitive price/performance structure at a time when IT budgets are under increased pressure.

Double-Take for Virtual Systems provides complete data protection and disaster recovery for virtual machines. It offers full operational support for VMware vSphere 4. Additionally, all other Double-Take Software products support the VMware vSphere 4 release.

McAfee Introduces New Enterprise Firewall Solutions

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McAfee today announced that it has upgraded its enterprise firewall products with new capabilities that help customers increase network security and lower their compliance and operational costs in both physical and virtual network environments. The products, McAfee Firewall Enterprise (formerly Sidewinder), McAfee Firewall Enterprise Control Center and McAfee Firewall Enterprise Profiler also feature streamlined management through integration with McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator software and leverage McAfee global threat intelligence to provide world class protection.

Today, McAfee Firewall Enterprise protects more than 15,000 customers worldwide including thousands of government agencies, Fortune 500 organizations, and seven of the top ten financial institutions. By deploying these next generation capabilities, customers will lower ongoing management costs.

Next generation capabilities include significant advancements in firewall management, hybrid delivery options and integrated layers of threat protection. With the addition of McAfee Firewall Profiler, McAfee Firewall Enterprise is application and identity aware. McAfee Firewall Enterprise is the first and only firewall to use a global reputation-based technology, including TrustedSource reputation and geo-location to filter unwanted traffic before it hits the network—stopping attacks before they happen.

McAfee Firewall Profiler is a revolutionary new capability that pinpoints in real-time how firewalls rules and rule changes impact application availability, usage and security. Profiler turns hours and days of rule creation deployment and troubleshooting work into a matter of clicks by providing administrators visibility into the business impact of rule changes. By providing an intuitive visual context based on users and applications, Profiler reduces the impact of creating or changing specific rules and helps firewall administrators implement new policies and respond rapidly to business needs.

The revised version of Control Center and Firewall Reporter dramatically simplify management of multiple firewalls and enable more accurate audit and compliance reports. Both Profiler and Control Center now integrate with McAfee ePO software. Firewall Control Center now provides ePO software with firewall health data and reports for each firewall.

McAfee Firewall Enterprise is now available in traditional appliance form factors, in a new virtualized hardware appliance and as a software-based firewall virtual appliance. These new delivery options allow customers to take advantage of virtualization technologies to lower cost and increase flexibility when consolidating datacenter and application environments and when bringing up new virtual environments.

McAfee Firewall Enterprise appliances are available today, starting at $4,900 USD. Exact pricing depends on customer requirements, selected model and associated add-on modules. The McAfee Firewall Enterprise Virtual Appliance is priced at $4900 per VMWare ESX instance. McAfee Firewall Profiler appliance starts at $19,500 USD and Firewall Enterprise Control Center starts at $6,900 USD.

Windows Server 2008 R2 Coming Half July, Public Availability Of Hyper-V 2.0 Set For 22 October

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From Microsoft’s Windows Server Division Weblog:

“You may have seen some of the recent news articles that have started to roll out around the RTM and General availability dates of Windows 7.  As Windows Server 2008 R2 is a joint development effort with Windows 7 we are aligned with the same RTM and General Availability (GA) dates.

With that – Windows Server 2008 R2  RTM code is on track to be available to our partners sometime in the 2nd half of July. Windows Server 2008 R2 will also be broadly available about the same time as the Windows 7 GA date of Oct 22.

Download and start testing with the RC candidate at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver“

Via Virtualization.info