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VMware ESX

VKernel Ships Capacity Analyzer 2.0 Virtual Appliance

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VKernel Corporation announced today the company is now shipping its Capacity Analyzer 2.0 virtual appliance.  New features and functionality include Disk I/O statistics, a more intuitive user interface, and enhanced scalability to ensure the optimal performance of the most demanding VMware ESX environments.

Capacity Analyzer continuously and proactively monitors shared CPU, memory, and storage resource utilization trends in VMware ESX environments across hosts, clusters, and resource pools.  By quickly identifying current and future performance-impacting capacity bottlenecks, Capacity Analyzer provides the critical resource utilization data to properly plan and grow the virtual server infrastructure, ensures optimal service level agreements (SLAs), and lowers the cost per virtual machine to realize a faster return on investment (ROI).

VKernel’s patent-pending Capacity Analyzer technology provides users with a unique single-screen dashboard view of their complete VMware environment and dynamically updates as additions and changes are made.  From the Capacity Analyzer dashboard, users have the advanced analytics to monitor and manage shared resource capacity, allocation, and utilization.

The VKernel Capacity Analyzer virtual appliance is currently available with pricing starting at $199 per CPU socket for the standard edition. There’s also a free, full-featured 14-day trial version available from the VKernel website.

VKernel

Bomgar Introduces B300v Virtual Appliance to Enhance Remote IT Support

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Bomgar is expanding its Bomgar Box family to include the B300v virtual appliance. Deploying the B300v within a VMware ESX infrastructure gives enterprises the flexibility to increase the capacity and manageability of IT support operations, while seamlessly ensuring that the help desk meets an organizations failover policy. IT administrators can also adapt to the changing support needs of today’s enterprise networks, leveraging the B300v to efficiently resolve computer-related issues in both virtual and physical environments.

Bomgar’s B300v provides IT organizations all of the robust features of its physical enterprise appliance, including integration with trouble ticket systems and security functions (i.e. session logging and reporting) with the versatility to deploy on a virtual server. This agility better aligns with disaster recovery initiatives as Bomgar’s virtual appliance can be replicated with ease for back-up and redundancy purposes. Additionally, the B300v enables organizations to take advantage of the virtual infrastructure and utilize pre-deployed networking, storage and servers.

Inherently, Bomgar’s products are purpose-built to provide IT support reps with secure access to any desktop via a secure Internet connection to resolve computer issues quickly. Bomgar provides enterprises of all sizes with the resources required to identify and resolve costly technology and business issues that cycle through the help desk.

The Bomgar B300v is currently available and technical specifications can be found on the Bomgar website.

BakBone Software Introduces NetVault: Backup VMware Plugin

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BakBone Software, a provider of heterogeneous integrated data protection solutions, announced that it is providing VMware data protection with a solution that protects both individual and entire groups of VMware ESX Servers, requires no scripting and is integrated with VMware technology and techniques.

BakBone’s NetVault: Backup VMware Plugin offers integration through the NetVault: Backup user interface, providing a way to provide VMware data protection. While other solutions on the market require complex scripting to work properly with VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB), BakBone incorporates these capabilities into a point-and-click user interface , the company said.

The NetVault: Backup VMware Plugin gives administrators integration with supported devices, including a VTL, SAN, NDMP or locally-attached drives. It offers granularity for Windows on VMware by allowing customers to backup and restore individual files within virtual machines and empowers storage administrators to create backup policies without the need to understand VCB internals or create complex scripts.

eG Innovations Adds XenServer and Sun LDoms Support to Its VM Monitor

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eG Innovations today announced that its eG VM Monitor now supports Citrix XenServer and Sun Microsystems’ Solaris Logical Domains (LDoms).

The enhancements are part of v4.2 of the company’s eG Enterprise Suite, which already supports VMware ESX and ESX 3i servers as well as Solaris Containers. The new software release also strengthens management of VMware environments. eG Enterprise agents can now be integrated directly within VMware’s Virtual Center. This greatly simplifies configuration of the monitoring for VMware server farms.

Also, the eG VM Monitor software now monitors the VMware Virtual Desktop Manager to provide an end-to-end view of a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployment. A new VM Search capability makes it easier to track the status and performance of virtual machines (VMs) as they move from one physical server to another.

The eG Enterprise Suite monitors Citrix XenServers and Sun LDoms in much the same way it monitors VMware ESX servers. eG Enterprise v4.2 offers agent-based and agentless monitoring of CitrixXen server v4.0 and 4.1. For agent-based monitoring, an eG agent on the control domain of a XenServer monitors the hypervisor and all its virtual machines (VMs).
Administrators can also choose to monitor their XenServers without agents, with either a Linux or a Windows system being used to host the remote data collector. Citrix XenMotion activity is tracked to determine when, how often, why and where VMs migrate to.

eG Enterprise v4.2 provides many other improvements and new features. These include: tracking and reporting uptime of individual VMs, ability to share customized views and reports among all or specific administrators, allowing administrators to select a console display “skin” (color) of their choice, providing selectable alert modes (e.g., email and SMS) to accommodate preferences of administrators who work in shifts; and custom monitoring of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

The eG Enterprise v4.2 will be available at the end of September. Pricing for any virtualization platform supported is per server monitored, regardless of the hardware capabilities (e.g., CPU, memory, socket) of the server, or the number of virtual machines or virtual desktops it supports. Pricing for a 25-node environment starts at $50,000.

DiscCloud Launches Virtual Appliance for Mac OS X

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DiscCloud today announced the release of the DiscCloud Virtual Appliance, the world’s first desktop virtualization platform designed for Mac OS X clients.

With DiscCloud, Mac desktops can be centrally administered, supported, and maintained using trusted and well known practices used by VMware professionals. The DiscCloud Virtual Appliance runs as a Virtual Machine on VMware Server and ESX class products, and hence on vast assortment of standard x86 platforms.

DiscCloud extends existing capabilities of the Mac desktop, via advanced VMware features such as automated backup, continuous availability, storage scalability, mobility, and desktop disaster recovery.

DiscCloud’s approach to desktop virtualization is 100% Apple license compliant, and supports Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) clients.

VKernel Debuts SearchMyVM, Search Utility for VMware ESX Server

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VKernel Corporation today announced the release of SearchMyVM, a free “Google-like” search utility for quickly finding information within rapidly expanding VMware ESX environment.

Check out the VKernel SearchMyVM Beta here.

VKernel SearchMyVM instantly deploys exactly like each one of VKernel’s virtual appliances. With a “Google-like” search interface, users can find their virtual machines, hosts, clusters, storage, resource pools, files, snapshots, VMware tools, applications and configuration information. Over 75 different types of attributes are fully indexed and available to customers for search.

VKernel