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VMware ESX

Veeam Offers Free Version Of Monitor 3.0

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Veeam Software, a provider of systems management tools for VMware ESX Server environments, today announced general availability of a new free tool: Veeam Monitor Free Edition. This lightweight version of Veeam Monitor is designed to provide comprehensive real-time monitoring in ESX and ESXi environments, including VMware’s free version of ESXi.

Veeam Monitor Free Edition is built from the ground up specifically for the virtual world, and uses an agentless approach (VMware API) to monitor system health and performance on both VMware ESX and ESXi. Customers can view real-time resource usage data for any virtual infrastructure object or collection of objects, as well as known infrastructure events, all on a single screen.  This unified view of the virtual infrastructure improves administrator productivity vs. fragmented views of isolated hosts and guests.

Key features of Veeam Monitor Free Edition include:

  • Consolidated view with drill-down in VMs – find out at a glance which components of the VMware infrastructure are the largest resource consumers, drill down to an individual VM to see how much CPU and memory it is consuming, and even connect to the VMware Virtual Machine Console – all right from the Veeam Monitor user interface.
  • Correlation of event and performance data – known virtual infrastructure events, such as VMotion, snapshot creation and deletion, or backup activities, are shown directly on the performance graphs.
  • Advanced alerting and flexible alarms – set up to ten e-mail notifications or SNMP traps for important events such as a given number of running VMs is exceeded, VM heartbeat is lost, or a specific event is generated by VirtualCenter.
  • Scalable architecture – client/server architecture supports multi-admin access to performance data without affecting ESX server or VirtualCenter performance.
  • Ease of deployment – takes just minutes to install, configure and begin using.

JumpBox Releases 38 Open Source Virtual Appliances In Open Virtualization Format (OVF)

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JumpBox, publisher of virtual appliances which provide ways to trial, develop, and deploy applications, this week announced the release of 38 Open Source applications in the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), a software standard for packaging and distributing virtual appliances.

A JumpBox is a pre-built and configured virtual appliance that deploys in minutes, saving users up to 70% of the time and cost of traditional software application deployment. OVF enables even simpler JumpBox deployments, particularly for users of the VMware ESX hypervisor based virtualization system.

Applications delivered as OVF are available to premium subscribers to JumpBox Open, JumpBox’s annual subscription suite of virtual appliances for Open Source software.

Novell Offers Solution For Workload Management In The “Mixed IT Data Center”

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Novell today announced significant enhancements to its PlateSpin Workload Management solution. The new PlateSpin Recon, PlateSpin Migrate, PlateSpin Protect and PlateSpin Orchestrate enable customers to profile, migrate, protect and manage server workloads between physical and virtual infrastructures in heterogeneous IT environments. Through these new enhancements, PlateSpin Workload Management is the only solution on the market today to support 32- and 64-bit Windows and Linux servers, as well as all leading hypervisors including Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and Virtual Server, VMware ESX and ESXi and Xen integrated in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

As data centers increasingly deploy diverse hardware platforms, operating systems and virtualization technologies in heterogeneous environments, the artificial boundaries between physical and virtual machines are being erased by portable workloads – the combination of an operating system, application and data software independent from the underlying physical or virtual platform. PlateSpin Workload Management enables data center administrators to optimize the distribution of workloads to provide the best performance for users and applications across both physical and virtual machines. As a result, customers can transform their IT environment into a more efficient and resilient next-generation data center.

PlateSpin Workload Management has added key functionality that makes PlateSpin a critical component of the day-to-day operation of the next-generation data center. PlateSpin Recon, PlateSpin Migrate and PlateSpin Protect are available now. PlateSpin Orchestrate will be available in the first quarter of 2009.

openQRM 4.2 Released, Includes Cloud Sauce

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Matt just let us know that he released openQRM 4.2 into the wild. This new opensource openQRM release includes VMware ESX and Citrix XenServer support, a Puppet plugin and the Cloud Add-on.

This new version comes with additional support for VMware ESX, an integration with Puppet for automated configuration management, improvements for the high-availability mechanism and, last but not least, a Cloud-plugin.

This new Cloud-plugin provides a fully automated private cloud with a separated Cloud portal for external data-center users to submit their requests to. The Cloud-plugin features a complete automated provisioning cycle including automatic deprovisioning, Deployment of phyiscal and virtual machines from different virtualization types, P2V, V2P, V2V, P2P, “Clone-on-deploy” and a billing system.

So with openQRM you can deploy and manage any machine inside and outside your firewall. Need that extra CPU load for a weekend on Amazon, fine openQRM will manage it for you.

openQRM is probably the first management tool that integrates both traditional Physical and Viritual Datacenter deployment and provisioning technologies and Cloud deployments all from 1 console , It allows you to migrate back and forth between different deployment types. So you might be running your test servers in the cloud and when you go live migrate them to a physical location within you firewall. openQRM even integrates a billing infrastructure, an administrator can hand out CCU Cloud Compute units to his openQRM users and they then can use resources in the Cloud for that budget.

John Willis said earlier this week in one of his podcasts that that the combination of openQRM , Puppet and Eucalyptus could be the dream combination that makes Datacenter management easier than ever.
Two third is done.. the final step might not be far away..

Did we mention it was Open Source ?

Go get openQRM here or watch the screencast for more information on the Cloud features.

Update: Matt just let us know the new openQRM.com is now live !

Veeam Releases Configurator 2.0 for VMware ESX

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Veeam Software, provider of systems management tools for VMware ESX Server environments, today announced general availability of its Veeam Configurator version 2.0.

The new version is significantly different from 1.0, offering new ways to boost VMware administrator efficiency in the areas of ESX server provisioning and configuration management. Veeam Configurator 2.0 automatically discovers ESX and ESXi configurations across the enterprise and creates Veeam host profile templates. These templates can then be applied to groups of VMware hosts, and periodic scans can uncover inconsistencies and allow administrators to enforce defined templates to ensure policy compliance. The templates can also be used to quickly provision a new or re-build an existing ESX host.

Veeam Configurator helps to ensure that ESX and ESXi host configuration complies with corporate policies and standards across the entire VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3). With Veeam Configurator, administrators can quickly and easily discover the current settings for all VMware hosts, review and adjust the captured configuration sets as needed, and use that information to define their baseline configuration templates. Veeam Configurator host configuration templates are applicable to groups of VMware hosts simultaneously from a central console. At any time, administrators can run the Configurator scan and receive detailed reports of exactly which hosts match the templates, which do not, and where the differences lie.

Veeam Configurator 2.0 is available immediately, with North American pricing starting at $250 USD per socket. Special introductory pricing of $150 per socket is available through the end of 2008.

SolarWinds Debuts Free VM Monitoring Tool

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SolarWinds, provider of downloadable network management software has released a new free tool, SolarWinds VM Monitor, and an update to its flagship Orion Network Performance Monitor (NPM) that will allow IT professionals to take advantage of the key characteristics of SolarWinds’ solutions — enterprise-class performance combined with affordability, quick deployment and ease of use — to manage and monitor their virtual deployments.

SolarWinds VM Monitor delivers an intuitive, desktop dashboard that continuously monitors a VMware ESX server and the associated virtual machines by providing real-time monitoring of ESX health indicators.

The SolarWinds VM Monitor is free and available for download on the SolarWinds site. Orion NPM is available now and pricing starts at $2,475 (USD) for 100 monitored elements including first year maintenance. Orion NPM customers, currently under maintenance, get the 9.1 updates for free.