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Release: PHD Virtual Monitor For VMware

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PHD Virtual Technologies, provider of virtual machine backup and recovery, and virtualization monitoring solutions, has announced the availability of PHD Virtual Monitor for VMware, extending its portfolio of end-to-end monitoring solutions designed for virtualization environments.

PHD Virtual Monitor provides cost effective, easy to use, end-to-end monitoring of the entire VMware and Citrix XenServer infrastructure including virtual, physical, application, network and storage resources.

PHD Virtual provides heterogeneous support today for VMware, XenServer and Hyper-V environments and plans to extend its monitoring product portfolio to support Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp and VMware View in the near future.

PHD Virtual Monitor is unique and different from other monitoring solutions that typically rely on either agent only or hypervisor only methods of monitoring, which can create “blind spots” in the IT infrastructure. PHD Virtual Monitor eliminates monitoring “blind spots”, providing complete, centralized end-to-end visibility of VMware and XenServer environments.

PHD Virtual Presents New Integrated Backup and Replication Solution

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PHD Virtual today announced the new version of PHD Virtual Backup and Replication, providing a single integrated solution for virtual machine backup, recovery and replication.

The new version includes an enhanced and optimized processing engine that provides unparalleled performance and scalability for backup and recovery of virtual machines along with new capabilities that provide more flexibility for DR in virtual environments.

PHD Virtual Backup and Replication boasts a new optimized processing engine, and a new enterprise edition provides twice the number of data streams per VBA (Virtual Backup Appliance), enabling up to 8 parallel streams for concurrent backup and restore processing.

The new processing engine also provides enhanced support to fully leverage multiple virtual CPU’s and virtual resources enabling seamless scalability.

PHD Virtual will demonstrate PHD Virtual Backup and Replication at VMworld 2011 next week in Las Vegas – it will be generally available in Q4 2011.

Industry Moves: PHD Virtual Technologies Ramps Up Engineering Team

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PHD Virtual Technologies, provider of the esXpress data protection and recovery solution for virtual machines, as announced that it has expanded its engineering team. To help lead this expanding team, which has doubled in overall R&D capacity in the past month, Vladimir Hrabrov has joined the company as vice president of engineering and Alex Mittell has been named director-senior virtualization architect.

Hrabrov joins PHD Virtual from Hewlett-Packard and has over 30 years of experience designing and developing enterprise-scale configuration management systems in entrepreneurial environments as well as established organizations. As a Certified Scrum Practitioner, he brings valuable experience in building strong, agile engineering teams, as well as a proven, disciplined approach to release, risk, and product quality management. At HP, Hrabrov was an R&D and program manager in charge of OS deployment for HP Client Automation. He joined HP as a part of the Novadigm acquisition where he was a senior architect and project manager. Before his work at Novadigm, Hrabrov worked at Legent Corp, Spectrum Concepts and the Ukrainian Ministry of Standards, where he held key management and development roles. He holds a master’s degree in Computer Science from National Technical University of Ukraine “Kyiv Polytechnic Institute.”

Mittell joined PHD Virtual in 2008 and is a widely known technical expert and thought leader in the virtualization community. He is a co-founder of Xtravirt, the UK provider of virtualization solutions throughout the technology lifecycle. While at Xtravirt, Alex authored many of the free virtualization tools that are available on the PHD Virtual web site. Prior to co-founding Xtravirt, he worked at Oxford University in the UK as a virtual architect, where he designed and configured the university’s virtual infrastructure.

PHD Virtual Extends esXpress Support To VMware vSphere 4

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PHD Virtual Technologies, provider of the esXpress data protection and recovery solution for virtual machines, today announced that esXpress has been extended to support VMware vSphere 4.

This new release of esXpress version 3.6 also includes significant enhancements for all versions of VMware’s ESX platform version 3.0.2 and above. An optimized deduplication engine dramatically increases backup speeds and fuels performance for file-level restores, as well as VMDK restores and data archival via a Windows Share.

esXpress, with new support for vSphere 4, performs backup and recovery using the virtual environment itself. By creating virtual backup appliances (VBAs) – small virtual machines – the solution can be deployed in minutes on VMware servers, and provides the most scalable environment for backing up virtual machines. New performance enhancements include:

  • Improved file level restore speeds are now up to four times faster
  • Data Restoration and Archival via Windows’ Shares are now up to four times faster
  • Improved PHDD deduplication image-level restore speeds up to twice as fast
  • Accelerated deduplication engine provides initial backups that are seeded at double the previous rates

esXpress continues to support up to 16 concurrent backup/restore streams per host and all backups can be self-restored without using esXpress or other proprietary virtual machine infrastructure. esXpress’ block level backups are de-duplicated source side, ensuring data is compressed and deduped before it every leaves the host. This ensures that network traffic is kept to a minimum even while backing up over a WAN link.

Release: PDH Virtual Patch Downloader 6.0

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PHD Virtual Technologies, provider of the esXpress data protection and recovery solution for virtual machines, today announced availability of Patch Downloader 6.0, a new freeware solution to simplify patch downloading for various VMware ESX versions. Patch Downloader is the fifth free virtualization utility to be offered by PHD Virtual as part of its longstanding commitment to the virtualization community.

Patch Downloader v6.0 eases the pain of downloading patches for various ESX versions from the VMware support site by automating the process for users that cannot use the VMware Update Manager. Now, rather than downloading each patch manually through a Java Download manager, VMware administrators can simply select the version of ESX from the Patch Downloader drop down menu, and select the file repository (including folder, drive map, SMB share, etc.) to download the patches to. The new freeware solution will list all of the available patches and information about the patches including severity of the problem it corrects, what the impact on VM/Host uptime is, and a description of the problem fixed.. Downloads of selected patches are performed with a simple click making it easy to keep the ESX patch repository up to date.

Patch Downloader joins PHD Virtual’s suite of other free VMware ESX utilities which include:

· VMNetBac 1.2.0 – VMNetBac allows customers to backup and restore the network configuration of a virtual machine. VMNetBac is a quick recovery tool to minimize the risk of losing network configurations when intrusive or mass-upgrade type tasks are performed.
· Virtual SAN 1.0.0 – This Virtual SAN appliance for VMware ESX 3 Server provides the benefits of shared VMFS storage without the cost of a SAN. It utilizes, otherwise unused, local storage in the ESX server to facilitate enterprise-level features such as vMotion, DRS and HA.
· SnapHunter 0.5.3 – SnapHunter is an ESX 3 Service Console utility which reports back on the Snapshot status of virtual machines from multiple ESX Servers.
· KS QuickConfig 1.3.0 – KS QuickConfig is a Windows GUI utility that reduces the time needed to deploy and configure VMware ESX 3 servers, and to eliminate inconsistencies that can arise with manual operations.

Also available on the PHD Virtual website is a full-featured trial download of the company’s award winning, scalable esXpress data recovery and data protection solution for virtual IT. esXpress v3.5 uniquely uses the virtual environment to backup itself without requiring any additional hardware or software, making it the most scalable and cost effective VMware backup solution on the market.

PHD Technologies Becomes PHD Virtual, Gives Away Virtualization Tools Free Of Charge

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PHD Virtual Technologies, provider of the esXpress high availability data protection solution for virtual IT, was unveiled today as the new corporate brand for PHD Technologies. Along with the new corporate identity, PHD Virtual is also introducing its new website, featuring free virtualization utility downloads (originally developed by xtravirt).

They include:

  • VMNetBac 1.2.0 – VMNetBac allows customers to backup and restore the network configuration of a virtual machine. VMNetBac is a quick recovery tool to minimize the risk of losing network configurations when intrusive or mass-upgrade type tasks are performed.
  • Virtual SAN 1.0.0 – This Virtual SAN appliance for VMware ESX 3 Server provides the benefits of shared VMFS storage without the cost of a SAN. It utilizes, otherwise unused, local storage in the ESX server to facilitate enterprise-level features such as vMotion, DRS and HA.
  • SnapHunter 0.5.3 – SnapHunter is an ESX 3 Service Console utility which reports back on the Snapshot status of virtual machines from multiple ESX Servers.
  • KS QuickConfig 1.3.0 – KS QuickConfig is a Windows GUI utility that reduces the time needed to deploy and configure VMware ESX 3 servers, and to eliminate inconsistencies that can arise with manual operations.

The new PHD Virtual site also provides a full-featured trial download of the company’s award winning, scalable esXpress data protection solution for virtual IT. esXpress enables companies to perform autonomous, fault-tolerant backup and restoration of an entire virtual environment in less time at lower cost with a virtual backup appliance (VBA). These small virtual machines can be deployed in minutes on an ESX server to autonomously conduct hot full or “virtual full” backups of virtual machines. esXpress can be deployed with minimal impact on virtual server, console or network performance and requires no additional hardware or software investment.