VMware today announced (PDF) it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire B-hive Networks, a privately-held application performance management software company with headquarters in San Mateo, California and principal R&D facilities in Herzliya, Israel.
With this acquisition, VMware intends to leverage the B-hive team and technology to offer proactive performance management and service level reporting for applications running within VMware virtual machines – on both servers and desktops.
In addition, B-hive’s R&D facility and team will form the core of VMware’s new development center in Israel.
The terms of the acquisition, which is expected to be completed during the third quarter of 2008, subject to customary closing conditions, were not disclosed.
“As customers increasingly standardize on the VMware platform to run their business-critical applications, it is critical for virtual infrastructure administrators to ensure the performance of applications from an end-user’s perspective,” said Stephen Herrod, Ph.D., chief technology officer, VMware. “B-hive’s agentless, virtual appliance-based approach goes beyond traditional monitoring approaches to proactively manage application performance to specified levels. These capabilities, combined with VMware’s proven virtualization platform, can allow our customers to consistently deliver on their application service level objectives. For example, if B-hive identifies degradation in application response time, it can remediate the problem by automatically instructing VMware Infrastructure to adjust the resources allocated to the application or provision an additional virtual machine with an additional instance of the application. In conjunction with VMware’s automated IT service delivery and business continuity capabilities, B-Hive’s service level management capabilities further deliver on the vision of an automated, always-on, virtual datacenter.”
Founded in 2005, B-hive has a solution that gives infrastructure groups visibility into application performance in virtual environments such as end-user transaction response time, virtual machine utilization and cross-virtual machine dependencies. According to the press release, the B-hive solution is designed to measure performance across multi-tier or service-oriented architecture applications that are distributed across clusters of ESX hypervisors and virtual machines.
Its flagship product, B-hive Conductor, monitors end-user performance and issues service level reports, but can also proactively resolve application performance problems by automatically triggering actions such as dynamically allocating more resources, migrating the application to a different server, provisioning additional VMs, changing transaction routing, or system re-boots. B-hive Conductor is agent-less, packaged as a virtual appliance and provides open, standards-based interfaces.
[Source: Globes]