News

Elastra Corporation has announced the availability of Elastra Cloud Server for Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is available free of charge to all AWS users.

Elastra’s Cloud Server for AWS enables application architects and developers to create application designs using a graphical canvas and immediately deploy them on Amazon’s EC2 infrastructure. Users can compose systems that use Apache, JBoss, Tomcat and MySQL components in a variety of user-controlled clustered and load-balanced configurations and deploy multiple instances of these designs onto AWS.

The application designs created and deployed with Elastra for AWS are portable to the customers’ own data centers running VMWare and Elastra’s Enterprise Cloud Server because designs and rules by which components interact are described via declarative markup languages rather than programmatic scripts or configuration files. The Enterprise Cloud Server also features added functionality – more components (Oracle, WebLogic, etc.), sophisticated governance and cloud management rules, and use of Amazon’s new Virtual Private Cloud.

5nine Software today announced 5nine Optimizer 1.0, a powerful and easy-to-use software solution for virtual environment analysis and optimization.

The new product helps customers reduce cost of over-provisioned multi-hypervisor virtual environments, and increase hardware utilization utilizing advanced trend analysis and “What If” modeling.

5nine Optimizer continuously analyzes virtualized data center environment including hosts, physical and virtual machines, and provides trend reporting, automated workload optimization as well as “What If” modeling. “What If” modeling includes the analysis of “What if I add a VM(s)” and “What if I add a host” scenarios further facilitating planning and optimization.

5nine Optimizer is integrated with 5nine P2V Planner, and two products together represent a comprehensive solution for P2V migration planning and optimization of a virtual environment. 5nine P2V Planner provides P2V VMware and P2V Hyper-V virtualization planning and delivers side-by-side comparative analysis of Hyper-V and VMware migration plans from the technology, TCO and ROI perspectives.
5nine Optimizer offers the following features and benefits:

• Continuous proactive analysis – of your data center and virtual environment
• Workload and utilization reports – for virtualization hosts, virtual and physical machines
• Long and short-term utilization trends
• Real-time workload and utilization alerts – to reduce virtualization administration costs and receive early notifications about potential performance problems
• “What-If” analysis and reports
• Automated P2V Hyper-V and VMware P2V / V2V wizards – to optimize your Virtual environment providing suggested migration plans for under and/or over-utilized hosts, and integrated TCO/ROI Reports
• All of the 5nine P2V Planner functionality – which includes easy-to-use automated P2V migration planning and side-by-side comparison of Hyper-V and VMware migration plans

VMware today announced the availability of VMware vCenter CapacityIQ, a new product in the VMware vCenter Product Family that provides complete capacity management for VMware virtualized environments.

VMware CapacityIQ empowers IT administrators with the necessary intelligence to be able to right-size capacity in a dynamic virtual environment. It provides unprecedented visibility into past, present and future infrastructure capacity in order to analyze what is available and what is being used; forecast what is needed; and plan when capacity will run out. As a result, VMware CapacityIQ helps eliminate infrastructure waste, reduce operational overhead and minimize business risk of outages, failures and disasters.

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ enables customers to proactively monitor capacity at multiple levels, analyze the impact of changes and forecast future needs based on consumption patterns. VMware CapacityIQ is critical for VMware customers who are interested in growing their virtual infrastructure cost-effectively –supporting server applications or virtual desktops – enabling them to:

• Reduce cost by reclaiming unused capacity. CapacityIQ proactively analyzes resource usage patterns and automatically generates a list of virtual machines that have been over-provisioned. Armed with this information, virtual infrastructure administrators can reclaim unused resources instead of purchasing additional capacity.
• Mitigate risk by modeling the effect of capacity changes. CapacityIQ helps customers avoid potential business and service disruptions by proactively modeling the impact of a planned change such as an acquisition or new application or an unplanned outage, failure or disaster.
• Deliver the right capacity at the right time. CapacityIQ keeps track of a dynamic VMware virtual environment by helping customers monitor capacity and forecast future capacity needs, helping to ensure capacity is always available to meet required service levels.

Xenocode, a developer of technologies enabling instant delivery of software across networks and platforms, today announced the immediate availability of the 2010 edition of Xenocode Virtual Application Studio.

Virtual Application Studio allows system administrators and software developers to easily virtualize existing Windows-based applications for instant, one-click deployment on the web, intranets, and USB drives.

Xenocode is an easy-to-use app virtualization and delivery technology that eliminates software installation and conflicts. Xenocode packages applications into self-contained, lightweight virtual machine executables that run instantly on any Windows desktop.

Virtual Application Studio 2010 includes dozens of feature enhancements and upgrades, including:

• Windows 7 compatibility: Xenocode is the first virtualization engine in its class to include full support for all editions of the new Windows 7 operating system.
• Publish to Web: Publish apps to the web with a single click. Once online, apps can be launched with a single click directly within a web browser over 10 times faster than traditional download.
• Software Expiration: Automatically create evaluation or license-restricted versions of existing apps with run time or date-based “timebomb” expiration.
• Multi-platform capabilities: Platform merge allows virtual application behavior to be customized on a per-operating system basis while distributing a single executable.
• Dozens of new application templates: Application templates allow one-click virtualization of most popular software applications, including Office, OpenOffice, Firefox, and Internet Explorer.

Xenocode is a powerful virtualization technology that packages apps into standalone virtual machines that run instantly on any desktop. Unlike traditional hardware virtualization, Xenocode technology exploits the host operating system environment to eliminate the need to emulate hardware or package operating systems with applications. Virtual applications require no setup, configuration, or device drivers, are insulated from conflicts, and run seamlessly across Windows variants and on locked-down desktops.

Xenocode Virtual Application Studio 2010 is available immediately via the web and through authorized Xenocode partners.

Nimsoft today announced that it has added a set of firsts to its Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS).

These new capabilities enable Nimsoft customers to extend real-time monitoring and historical reporting beyond the virtualised datacentre to hosted, cloud- and SaaS-based resources and applications. By extending monitoring from the virtualised datacentre to the cloud, customers will gain complete visibility over their entire IT infrastructure, enabling them to measure and improve service delivery, allocate computing resources for maximum performance, and enforce service level agreements (SLAs).

NMS is based on a scalable and extensible architecture that enables complete visibility and monitoring from a single product, eliminating the need to invest in additional products every time IT infrastructures change or expand. By monitoring all computing resources, Nimsoft customers will be able to make better decisions as they transition to a combination of internal and external environments.

New feature set delivers additional capabilities for monitoring both internal and external environments including:

• Cloud and SaaS Probes: Enable users to gain complete visibility over the performance and availability of Google Apps for Business, Rackspace Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and EC2, Salesforce.com, and other services. By understanding status and response time, users can determine if outsourced platforms and applications are meeting their service delivery commitments.

• Nimsoft Unified Monitoring APIs: Allow for easy extensions to NMS. This complete set of documented APIs is available to both customers and third-party developers.

• The Nimsoft Unified Reporter: Delivers more than 100 reports out of the box, and allows users to create their own performance and capacity planning reports. Information from these reports can be used to make decisions on how and where to redistribute workloads, to identify problems in the infrastructure, to benchmark performance metrics, and to prove where SLAs are not being met.

• Virtualisation Probes: Provide users 100 percent visibility over virtualisation platforms including Citrix, Microsoft HyperV, IBM Power-V, VMware, and Sun Solaris Zones. Complete visibility enables users to monitor and optimise the performance of all applications and resources running on virtual servers, and enables the optimisation of compute resources across business services.

• RCA (root cause analysis) and Topology Manager: Presents deep discovery and both virtual and physical topology views of the network. When an outage occurs, knowing where the root cause of the problem is dramatically reduces mean time to repair (MTTR).

In addition to providing Unified Monitoring for the broadest range of IT systems and applications in use today, these new features deliver:

• A scalable and extensible architecture that keeps pace with rapid IT infrastructure growth, monitors all internal and external IT systems, and provides a path to extend Unified Monitoring to new metrics such as power consumption

• A customisable management dashboard that enables IT administrators to get a single view of the overall health, performance and availability of their IT infrastructure and business applications irrespective of where they reside

• The industry’s most rapid deployment and shortest time to value, with a total cost of ownership up to 80 percent less than legacy solutions

AccelOps, datacenter service management innovator, today announced it has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program.

The VMware TAP program helps technology vendors integrate their products with VMware virtualization software and deliver timely, joint solutions to mutual customers.  AccelOps offers a seamlessly integrated datacenter management solution, packaged as a virtual appliance or SaaS for the mid-tier enterprise, which provides end-to-end visibility and IT service intelligence.

To improve service reliability, one must see and manage all aspects of performance, availability and security related to that service.  AccelOps provides transparency and service-relevance to virtual operations.  AccelOps’ virtual appliance links physical and virtual environments to business services and automatically discovers and monitors relationships, configurations, health, trends and metrics to achieve service-levels, expedite root-cause analysis and reconcile resource usage.

AccelOps integrates core datacenter/IT management functions and seamlessly combines state-of-the-art discovery and CMBD, cross-domain correlation, monitoring and alerting, interactive dashboards and topology maps, automated service definition and SLA tracking, identity and location management, enterprise search, case management, and built-in analytics and reports tied to industry best practices.

AccelOps invites VMware partners, prospects and customers to visit the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace and learn more about our AccelOps Try and Buy program.