Virtualization.com

News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

Vizioncore

Vizioncore Offers vConverter SC and vControl Multi-Hypervisor Management as Freeware

by 2 Comments

Vizioncore today announced that vControl’s multi-hypervisor management capability will now be available for free.

Customers who have VMware ESX infrastructures, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer infrastructure can now manage these environments through a single console – helping to reduce administration costs and improve management consistency.

vControl Multi-Hypervisor Management provides a browser-based interface that enables control of multiple platforms, allowing administrators to leverage easy-to-trigger workflows for task-based administration of VMs. Furthermore, vControl Multi-Hypervisor Management provides a cost-effective solution for high availability in the data center.

In addition to vControl Multi-Hypervisor Management, Vizioncore offers vControl Self-Service Provisioning for $399/socket. With this product VM consumers can build and provision VMs for themselves through customizable VM templates.

Furthermore, the company has also announced that vConverter SC (Server Consolidation) will now be available for free as well. Customers may use the tool to accelerate towards a virtualized environment, making the most of maintenance windows and reducing downtime on current physical machines.

vConverter SC offers an intuitive GUI to enable rapid simultaneous conversions of single or multiple servers without disruption to the source system. By combining cutting-edge disk and networking technology with extensive automation of pre- and post-conversion tasks, it boasts the ability to successfully migrate more servers per conversion window, saving valuable maintenance time. Furthermore the product is compatible with hypervisors from leading vendors such as VMware, Microsoft and Citrix, making it the perfect fit for almost every environment.

Vizioncore Debuts vOptimizer WasteFinder as Freeware

by 1 Comment

Vizioncore today announced that vOptimizer Pro’s space and alignment scanning and reporting capabilities will now be available as a new freeware product called vOptimizer WasteFinder.

VMware customers will be able to use vOptimizer WasteFinder to search for over-allocated virtual storage and to immediately see the potential savings available from reclaiming this space.

Vizioncore customers worldwide have been using vOptimizer Pro to drastically reduce wasted virtual storage, typically an area in which businesses have little or no transparency or control. Once found, over-allocated storage can be reclaimed and reused by other virtual machines or other physical infrastructure. Businesses that have never considered themselves at risk of excessive storage waste can now easily and quickly download vOptimizer WasteFinder for free and reveal the true picture.

The tool also detects problem areas such as virtual machines that are not 64k aligned, which leads to poor I/O performance. Vizioncore’s initiative to offer free tools that accelerate virtualization adoption started earlier this year with the launch of the Virtualization EcoShell Initiative (VESI). Virtualization EcoShell focuses on script-based VM administration, providing a powerful personal productivity solution to VM administrators.

With a download and set-up time of approximately 15 minutes, vOptimizer WasteFinder can be run by any VMware customer. vOptimizer WasteFinder can be downloaded for free here, and additional product information is available here.

Vizioncore Announces Changes To Product Team

by Leave a Comment

Vizioncore today announced key changes to its product team: Jason Mattox, a founder of the company, will assume the role of vice president, Support and CTO, and Tyler Jewell becomes vice president, Products.

As vice president, CTO, and one of the original founders of Vizioncore, Jason Mattox remains the driving force behind Vizioncore’s product strategy to create a comprehensive set of solutions that propels management of virtual environments to new levels of precision and flexibility, while addressing the realities and challenges that today’s companies face. Mattox is one of the industry’s top minds in virtualization, with 12 years experience in IT architecture,An focused on consolidation and virtualization from the desktop to the enterprise.

As vice president, Products for Vizioncore, Tyler Jewell is responsible for Product Management and Product Marketing Management. Having been with Quest Software, Vizioncore’s parent company, for more than four years, Jewell has been responsible for a wide range of businesses spanning database, application, and infrastructure management. He led the team that brought vFoglight and vControl to market, and drove a portfolio to include investments in a number of high growth markets. He brings a wealth of experience from previous positions at BEA, Veritas and MySQL.

Release: Vizioncore vRanger Pro 4.0 DPP

by Leave a Comment

Vizioncore has announced the general availability of vRanger Pro 4.0 DPP (Data Protection Platform), the company’s virtualization backup and recovery solution. vRanger 4.0 DPP has been entirely re-designed into a Data Protection Platform to offer organizations of all sizes reduced backup windows, additional scalability and flexibility, and smarter backup options to protect their critical data held on virtual machines (VMs).

The Data Protection Platform introduces two major architectural innovations. First, its Direct-To-Target architecture introduces a Plug-N-Play modularity system that enables backup once, recover many capability over multiple protocols and storage targets. vRanger Pro 4.0 DPP performs image-level backups and restores at the file- or image-level and will restore at the object-level in the future. These activities are “direct to target” flowing directly between hosts and targets without the use of a middleware proxy. Second, its Smart Backup Manager introduces an intelligent job engine that enables real-time and parallel management of jobs in a scalable manner.

Vizioncore Updates Virtualization Management and Optimization Solutions

by Leave a Comment

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.

Vizioncore Already Boasts Support For VMware vSphere 4

by Leave a Comment

Vizioncore yesterday announced that it is already able to support VMware vSphere, made generally available also yesterday by VMware.

The broad product set from Vizioncore including vFoglight (available now), vReplicator (available now), vOptimizer Pro (within 30 days) and its flagship backup and restore solution, vRanger Pro (within 45 days), will continue to extend VMware vSphere 4 and enable organizations to protect, monitor, optimize and automate VMware’s revolutionary new operating system for building an internal cloud.