support

TheAdmins Introduces 24×7 Tech Support On All Things Citrix, Microsoft, VMware and Cisco

July 30, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

TheAdmins, a value-added reseller (VAR) providing virtualization, application delivery, data security, network infrastructure and storage/business continuity services, today announced the introduction of its Continuous Support Offering (CSO).

TheAdmins CSO is a service level agreement (SLA)-based support service designed to supplement IT services staff in resolving technology-critical issues with select Citrix, Microsoft, VMware and Cisco products.

Traditionally, companies have purchased IT services support agreements directly from manufacturers to serve as a lifeline in the event of an emergency. However, the reality is that many of these agreements serve as a mere insurance policy, and if unused, result in lost fees – only to be renewed again the following year. Also, manufacturer support is typically limited to the manufacturing company’s product line only – resulting in very specific and restricted support.

Products currently supported through TheAdmins CSO include:

All Citrix products
Microsoft (Active Directory, Messaging and Windows Server)
VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI4 support coming soon)
Cisco (routing and switching)

Service level agreement response time is as follows:

One-hour for telephone support
Four-hour for on-site coverage for New Jersey, New York City and Philadelphia

TheAdmins CSO is available now to new and existing TheAdmins customers. The cost of the service is $6,250 annually for 25 support hours, which can be used for telephone or on-site support seven days a week, 24 hours a day.

Upon depletion of the purchased hours, replenishment options are available. Any time remaining at the end of 12 months may be used for other TheAdmins IT services, such as projects, staff supplementation, system management and troubleshooting.

VKernel Adds Support For VMware’s vSphere 4 Platform

June 17, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VKernel has announced that its complete product suite fully supports the VMware vSphere 4 platform. VKernel products complement vSphere 4 and deliver advanced capabilities and functionality to enhance performance of the virtual data center and achieve a faster return on investment.

The VKernel suite of virtual server health and optimization tools solve a number of critical data center challenges impacting IT staffs today. Delivered as a VMA (Virtual Management Appliance), VKernel software instantly deploys and is simple to use to maintain the health of the data center and optimize resource allocations — reducing operational and capital costs and delivering a superior ROI. VKernel currently supports VMware ESX and vSphere, and plans to support Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XEN. The company’s current products include:

Capacity Analyzer — proactively and predicatively monitor shared capacity resources to prevent current and future problems and optimize the environment
Chargeback — provide instant cost visibility and implement a chargeback processes
Modeler — quickly test and validate additions and changes to see the performance impact on the environment before going live
SearchMyVM — free “Google–like” search utility quickly finds information in virtual environments
CompareMyVM — a free community website tool allows visitors to exchange and compare virtual machine (VM) resource allocations with that of the community at large
SnapshotMyVM — free tool that completely automates the time–consuming process of documenting the virtual data center

Solidcore S3 Control Software Now Supports VMware ESX

August 26, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Solidcore Systems, who specializes in change audit and configuration control, today announced its S3 Control software detects and validates change events to VMware environments in real time. Unlike previous methods that relied on multiple scan-based tools to manage change, the S3 Control software reconciles change events in real time from both virtual and physical infrastructures with an enterprise change management process.

Solidcore S3 Control eases the burden of managing the multitude of change events across virtualized systems by tracking changes on VMware ESX servers and virtual consoles in real time, alerting and reporting on change events, and correlating changes to authorization. All change events can be reconciled with an existing change management system, including HP Service Manager, BMC Remedy, CA Unicenter, and IBM Tivoli Service Desk.

Solidcore S3 Control captures “who” is making changes, “what” is being changed, “when” change is occurring, “how” the change was implemented, and “where” the change was made. This enables IT organizations to ensure deployed virtual and physical systems are always in a known and verified state. Solidcore can track changes to user roles and permissions, data stores attached to ESX hosts, high-availability configurations, Virtual Machine (VM) templates, resource pools, scheduled tasks, and guest VMs. Solidcore can also identify new users that have been created, edited or deleted, new hosts added to VMware VirtualCenter, and license server events in virtual systems. S3 Control validates these changes against the change management system, where any changes with a corresponding ticket are marked “authorized” and the change management system is updated with the current change information. Changes that occur without a matching ticket are immediately identified for review.

Solidcore’s support for VMware ESX is available today in the latest release of the Solidcore S3 Control software.

Solidcore Systems

[Source: Businesswire]

Microsoft Unveils New Licensing, Expanded Product Support Policies to Ease Path to Virtualization

August 19, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Microsoft just made a couple of noteworthy announcements.

Update: more background information on the Windows Virtualization Team blog.

Beginning Sept. 1, 2008, customers will be able to move any of 41 Microsoft server applications between servers within a server farm as often as necessary without paying additional licensing fees, and they can take advantage of expanded technical support.

As you probably already know, Microsoft also will begin a worldwide series of “Get Virtual Now” events this month that will showcase Microsoft virtualization products and partner solutions, reaching more than 250,000 IT professionals.

Microsoft is updating its software licensing terms for 41 server applications, including Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise edition, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 Standard and Enterprise editions, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Enterprise and Professional editions, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and Microsoft System Center products.

The company is waiving its previous 90-day reassignment rule, allowing customers to reassign licenses from one server to another within a server farm as frequently as needed. For many customers, the change will reduce the number of licenses they need to support their IT systems, increase agility, and simplify the tracking of application instances or processors because customers now can count licenses by server farm instead of by server.

Microsoft has also updated its technical support policy for 31 server applications so that customers can receive technical support when deploying those applications on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server or any other third-party validated virtualization platform. Now customers can get the same level of product support in a virtualized environment that they are accustomed to with non-virtual environments.

To enable this support policy, Microsoft launched the Server Virtualization Validation Program last June. The program is open to any software vendor to test and validate its virtualization software to run Windows Server 2008 and previous versions of Windows Server. We just reported that Cisco and VMware are joining the program.

VirtualLogix Now Supports Windows Vista

June 25, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VirtualLogix yesterday announced support for Microsoft Windows Vista to operate side-by-side with real-time operating systems (RTOS) for performance critical systems.

“VirtualLogix VLX now offers support of Windows Vista, offering high-performance, simple designs and an immediate return on investment to a wide set of real-time systems, in applications such as automotive, industrial and medical equipment,” said Peter Richards, CEO, VirtualLogix. “Key customers have asked that we provide Vista on our VLX roadmap and we have delivered. This enables VLX to support a wider spectrum of systems using Microsoft’s operating systems as a core solution component.”

Windows Vista is now supported on Intel processors for VLX Embedded and VLX for Network Infrastructure —all of which maintain the time-sensitive control and signal processing functions that communications devices demand.