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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.

VKernel Introduces New Optimization Pack

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VKernel Corporation has announced the new VKernel Optimization Pack to help organizations achieve maximum ROI from their virtualization projects.

VKernel’s new Optimization Pack includes three powerful applets, Wastefinder, Rightsizer and Inventory, that help users improve the efficiency of their virtual infrastructures. The new applets allow organizations to run more virtual machines (VMs) with the same hardware, maximize the utilization of infrastructure resources, reclaim terabytes of wasted storage, reduce VM sprawl and assure optimal VM performance.

A successful virtualization project balances proper resource allocations and utilizations with VM performance and cost per VM. With the Optimization Pack, VKernel enables organization to rapidly achieve their goals by providing a very affordable and simple-to-use toolset. Delivered as a virtual appliance, deployment is instant and users immediately begin solving their critical needs. The VKernel Optimization Pack includes three powerful management applets:

  • Wastefinder – quickly finds where resource capacity (CPU, memory, and storage) are being wasted in the virtual infrastructure. By identifying zombie VMs, expired snapshots, and other wasteful consumers, users can reclaim expensive capacity to optimize virtual environments and achieve a better, faster ROI.
  • VM Rightsizer – a simple tool for tuning your VMs with the right amount of resources (CPU, memory, and storage) to drive maximum VM densities without impacting performance. Rightsizer is unique in its ability to make recommendations and automatically implement changes to find improperly allocated resources and optimally configure VMs.
  • Inventory – automatically collects important information about all VMs in the virtual infrastructure and creates a detailed inventory report showing VM name, created by and when, resource allocations, and much more. The inventory is continually updated to match the dynamic environment and is searchable by different criteria to quickly find specific information.

VKernel currently supports VMware ESX and vSphere and plans to support Microsoft Hyper-V (later this year) as well as Citrix XEN Server. The company believes that a heterogeneous capacity management and optimization offering will be increasingly important as the enterprise virtual infrastructure becomes a mix of hypervisor platforms.

The VKernel Optimization Pack is currently available in a bundle with Capacity Analyzer 4.1 for $399 per CPU socket including the first year of maintenance and support. Subscription pricing is also offered at $179 annually per CPU socket including maintenance and support.

VMware Global Partners Support Distributed Power Management (DPM), Part of vSphere 4

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VMware today announced VMware global partners, including Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM and NEC have announced their support of using VMware Distributed Power Management (DPM). VMware DPM, part of the VMware vSphere 4 platform, lowers power consumption in the datacenter by aggregating unused capacity and powering off unused servers without disrupting service levels, helping customers slash energy consumption by as much as 20 percent.

VMware virtualization has received acclaim for enabling customers to reduce energy costs and consumption in certain cases by as much as 80 percent through server consolidation and dynamic migration of virtual machines across physical servers. VMware DPM provides up to 20 percent additional reduction in energy usage on top of what is possible with consolidation by automatically placing all virtual machines on the fewest number of physical servers and powering down the physical servers that are not necessary to guarantee service levels to applications. A typical use case would be powering down physical servers at night or on weekends when the application loads decrease; as application loads increase at the beginning of the working day, VMware DPM would power on servers and again redistribute the applications.

Uptime Software Upgrades VMware Monitoring and Reporting Tool

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uptime software has announced the latest version of its systems management software, up.time 5. Through close collaboration with VMware and its vSphere and vCenter Orchestrator offerings, up.time’s new capabilities aspire to change the way enterprises manage, measure, and monitor their VMware infrastructure.

up.time represents a leap forward for companies that need to drive both performance and cost-savings from their VMware infrastructure, while ensuring a consistent quality of service. It does this by providing IT managers with an unobstructed view of the datacenter to efficiently manage distributed applications and global services levels, while maximizing enterprise-wide IT resources. The solution’s ability to span both physical and virtual realms has helped hundreds of customers achieve new levels of performance and render immediate cost savings. QuickPlay Media, a customer dedicated to providing solutions that manage the business of mobile video for the world’s leading communications providers, is one example.

The new capabilities announced today– advanced visibility, deep VMware metrics and reporting, automated problem resolution and incidence avoidance –raise the bar for managing VMware performance with:

  • Increased VMware efficiency though dramatic increases in VM density and optimized VM workloads.
  • Automated incidence avoidance that reduces manual find/fix by automatically heading off reoccurring problems before they happen. Deep and seamless integration with VMware vCenter Orchestrator® makes building out automated problem avoidance workflows easy, providing advanced capabilities for SMB and Enterprise companies. This dramatically reduces Mean-Time-To-Repair and required resources, while increasing performance and productivity.
  • Fast problem isolation and resolution through intelligent alerting, easy pinpointing of root cause, and automated actions that can eliminate recurring outages in the future.
  • Rapid VMware infrastructure growth requiring fewer resources by delivering an easy-to-use consolidation, monitoring, optimization, and automation solution, all while helping reduce VM sprawl.
  • Improved visibility and manageability of the entire infrastructure from a single console, including virtual and physical infrastructures and applications, and across multiple datacenters.

An enterprise version of up.time is available for a risk-free 30 day evaluation download here –  (a Virtual Appliance is also available for download here. uptime software’s world-class support services are free during this evaluation period to help customers drive value in their environments.

VMware vSphere 4 Arrives Ahead Of Schedule

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VMware yesterday announced the general availability of VMware vSphere 4, delivered ahead of schedule and with the support of an extensive partner ecosystem and customers around the globe.

VMware vSphere 4 extends the previous generation VMware platform — VMware Infrastructure 3 — along three dimensions: it delivers the efficiency and performance required to run business critical applications in large scale environments, it provides uncompromised control over application security and service levels, and it preserves customer choice of hardware, OS, application architecture and on-premise vs. off-premise application hosting.

VMware vSphere 4 enables transformative capital and operational expenditure cost savings over and above what was previously achievable, including 30 percent increase in consolidation ratios, 50 percent storage savings, and 20 percent additional power savings. With VMware vSphere 4, even the most resource intensive business critical applications will benefit from the built-in service level assurance capabilities for availability, security and scalability.

Customers are already harnessing VMware vSphere 4 to bring the benefits of cloud computing to their datacenters, creating a practical approach to their own private clouds — cloud computing infrastructures that span internal IT with external cloud service providers.

VMware vSphere 4 is available in six editions meeting the requirements, use cases and budgets of customers of all sizes from small businesses to the largest enterprises and government organizations. Prices start at $166 per processor for all in one virtualization solutions for small businesses and go up to VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus priced at $3,495 per processor delivering features to transform the datacenter into an internal private cloud.

Neptuny To support VMware vSphere By The End Of This Year

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Neptuny today announced that Neptuny Caplan will support VMware vSphere by the end of 2009.

VMware vSphere, launched last week as “the industry’s first cloud operating system” has been designed to enable customers to transform their IT infrastructures into a federation of private and on-demand to external clouds. The final promise of vSphere (and other similar initiatives) is making IT services more easily accessible, flexible and reliable, thus providing more control over service levels, without increasing infrastructure complexity and costs.

Neptuny recently joined VMware’s Technology Alliance Partner program and Caplan, its flagship product providing Capacity Planning for large data centers and networks, fully supports virtualized environments based on VMware technology.

In particular, Caplan supports consolidation and virtualization initiatives on ESX servers by first identifying the best candidates and targets and then suggesting optimal placements (with respect to technical, business and compliance criteria) together with suggestions on how to assign appropriate resource shares. Therefore, by supporting VMware vSphere, Neptuny will enable customers to adopt the vSphere technology and to manage all resources of the next-generation data centers with the same ease of use available in Caplan.