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VMware Launches An Official Publishing Entity With A Little Help From Pearson

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Pearson, the world’s leading learning company, and VMware have announced VMware Press, a newly created technical imprint that will serve as VMware’s official publishing entity.

The newly formed press will provide a suite of virtualization technology and certification products in multiple languages and formats, and will focus on three types of content:

– Technical books, ebooks and videos that concentrate on specific applications of virtualization.
– Decision Maker books, ebooks and videos that focus on the business aspects of virtualization.
– Official certification materials that support VMware’s complete certification program.

The majority of the new products will target VMware technology, primarily VMware vSphere, VMware View, VMware vCenter and VMware vCloud, which comprise the basic platform for all of VMware’s products and services.

Working in conjunction with VMware, Pearson plans to leverage the user group community programs and social channels to further engage the VMware community and offer exclusive promotions and access to the certification and technology products endorsed by VMware.

VMware To Debut New Products: VMware Go and vCenter Product Family

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VMware is launching two new products at VMworld, its annual conference, tomorrow.

The first is a suite of VMware’s existing virtualization solutions, called the VMware vCenter Product Family. The suite is built on top of VMware’s vSphere 4 to help enterprises create and maintain dynamic and flexible IT infrastructures.

VMware says that they have received an overwhelmingly positive response the latest generation of vSphere 4, with approximately 75 percent of customers planning to upgrade to VMware vSphere 4 within the next six months.

VMware’s second product launch is targeted towards small to medium sized businesses. VMware Go is a free beta service that makes it simple for clients to get started with virtualizing their applications. A web-based service, VMware Go will lets companies run multiple operating systems and applications on a single server, helping SMBs to spend less money on hardware, energy and server administration.

Via Between the lines.

VMware Debuts vCenter AppSpeed, vCenter Chargeback and vCenter Lab Manager 4

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VMware today announced advancements in virtualization management with the general availability of two new products: VMware vCenter AppSpeed and VMware vCenter Chargeback. VMware also announced today a major release of VMware vCenter Lab Manager 4. These new products simplify and automate key IT processes such as application performance monitoring, chargeback, and management of dev/test environments to increase IT productivity in the datacenter – delivering more value to customers as they scale out their virtual environments.

Generally available today, VMware vCenter AppSpeed provides service-level reporting and proactive performance management for multi-tier applications running in virtual machines. AppSpeed gives IT administrators visibility into how application performance depends on the different tiers of virtual and physical infrastructure. Easy to install and non-intrusive, VMware vCenter AppSpeed discovers, monitors, and reports within minutes of installation/download, helping customers:

  • Increase application performance and uptime
  • Troubleshoot and resolve performance issues more quickly, saving hours of administrative time
  • Virtualize more machines at a faster rate

VMware vCenter AppSpeed is available for $1250 per processor.

Also generally available today, VMware vCenter Chargeback ensures accountability across the business by allocating and reporting on costs associated with the use of virtual infrastructure. With VMware vCenter Chargeback, multiple factors such as cost-based models and fixed costs can be mapped to datacenter resources and then applied across cost centers to ensure proper business alignment. VMware vCenter Chargeback helps customers:

  • Provide business units with a clear view into resources consumed and their associated costs – enabling “showback” of valuable information, even for organizations not yet ready to chargeback to the business
  • Automatically create detailed billing reports that can be submitted to business units within an organization
  • Transition the IT environment from a cost center to a value center

VMware vCenter Chargeback is available for $750 per processor.

VMware vCenter Lab Manager 4, first introduced in 2006 and now in its fourth generation, provides IT with the ability to create and manage an internal cloud for dev/test, providing higher service levels to users through self-service access to resources needed for development, test, staging and deployment of complex, multi-tier applications. With VMware vCenter Lab Manager, IT can give users on-demand, role-based access to a shared library of pre-configured multi-VM environments, eliminating the need for repetitive system setup and teardown, while enabling IT to maintain security and full administrative control.

The new features in VMware vCenter Lab Manager 4 include:

  • Unification with VMware Stage Manager, creating a single solution to encompass multiple use cases including streamlined application delivery from development to production; simplified release management; and better training, support and online demo environments.
  • Next-generation network fencing capabilities to better support teams working on multiple instances of extremely large-scale application environments
  • Support for both ESX and ESXi form factors to give IT administrators more deployment choices for internal cloud resources.

VMware vCenter Lab Manager helps IT reduce dev/test infrastructure costs and administrative overhead, while providing users with improved team collaboration, accelerated workflows, and faster time to market for new or updated applications. VMware vCenter Lab Manager is available for $1,495 per processor.

VMware And HP Enhance Partnership

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VMware announced that it signed an OEM agreement to integrate HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping software into the VMware vCenter suite and is also working with HP on new datacenter management initiatives.

In addition, HP has integrated VMware ThinApp with the HP Client Automation policy-based management platform. Both of these initiatives will help customers seamlessly and cost-effectively manage their physical and virtual datacenter and desktop initiatives. Today’s announcement expands on the companies’ existing strong relationship designed to provide customers with complete solutions that help them build and manage dynamic datacenters for delivering IT as a service.

In the first area of collaboration, VMware will OEM the HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping software into the VMware vCenter management suite. VMware will integrate HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping software as a virtual appliance into VMware vCenter ConfigControl in 2010 after ConfigControl becomes available to further enable customers to maintain visibility and ensure compliance of configuration states in their VMware vSphere 4 environments. A combined solution will give VMware vCenter administrators “single pane of glass” visualization of how business services running in VMware virtual machines map to the physical infrastructure. This will enable customers to simplify management of their heterogeneous infrastructures through comprehensive discovery and dependency mapping as well as automation of common management tasks including change detection, configuration updates, provisioning, patching, and enforcement of compliance and security policies.

VMware has also worked with HP to extend the HP Client Automation policy-based management platform to support VMware ThinApp. This enables customers to standardize on a single client management solution to publish, deploy, track and report on virtualized applications along with physical applications. Customers can use the distributed infrastructure and preconfigured templates available in HP Client Automation software to manage VMware ThinApp’s new management functionality, decreasing infrastructure requirements and simplifying overall manageability. Customers can also use reports generated by HP Client Automation software to track virtual and physical applications for tighter asset management.

As a result of this enhanced collaboration and co-development, the two companies plan to jointly develop go-to-market and sales programs that leverage both companies’ direct and channel sales forces.

Hitachi Data Systems Introduces New Replication Support for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager

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Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, today announced the immediate availability of the second generation of Hitachi Storage Replication Adapter for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager. Today’s announcement adds support for the midrange Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage family, providing customers continuous, real time local and remote replication and automatic failover capabilities to ensure resilient data protection, high availability and disaster recovery for VMware environments.

As more businesses implement VMware virtualization, they need to ensure that the data generated in this virtual environment is properly protected. At the same time, businesses are discovering that traditional approaches to disaster recovery and business continuity are not as cost-effective in virtual environments. To address these pressing customer challenges to ensure greater uptime at lower operational costs, the Hitachi Storage Replication Adapter facilitates the linkage between Hitachi market leading system-based replication technologies, including Hitachi Universal Replicator, Hitachi TrueCopy Synchronous, Hitachi TrueCopy Extended Distance and Hitachi ShadowImage in-system replication software, and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager. Coupled together, these software solutions provide operational resilience, robust data protection, recovery management and replication capabilities optimized for VMware Infrastructure.

The Hitachi Storage Replication Adapter links Hitachi replication software and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager to provide tremendous operational resilience, robust data protection, and recovery management and replication capabilities that complement VMware Infrastructure.

Akorri Announces BalancePoint Plug-In For VMware vCenter

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Akorri has announced the availability of the BalancePoint Plug-In for VMware vCenter — a new capability sold with its BalancePoint software solution that allows VMware administrators to use BalancePoint directly from their VMware vCenter console, simplifying the management of virtualized environments.

“The BalancePoint Plug-In for VMware vCenter provides ‘single pane of glass’ management of a virtualized data center from within the vCenter console,” said Jeff Boles, senior analyst with the Taneja Group. “BalancePoint complements the element management aspects of vCenter by providing end-to-end performance management for all virtual and physical infrastructure components. This type of detailed insight goes well beyond basic utilization monitoring, and is absolutely critical to companies when they virtualize business-critical production applications.”

“We are excited to further our integration through our new Plug-In capability,” said Tom Joyce, president and CEO of Akorri. “Our goal is to simplify the management of heterogeneous virtualized server and storage environments. By adding this Plug-In we have taken an important step towards providing a unified management experience, which is essential for our VMware customers.”