Last week Quest announced three new products, Clout Automation Platform 7.5, vFoglight 6.5 and vFoglight Storage 1.0, but just the last one is available right now. vFoglight comes from the rebranding of the Vizioncore portfolio , completed at the end of August. The last Vizioncore version of the product is 6.0, released in November 2009. The new 6.5 version introduces a number of new capabilities, including the much expected support for Microsoft Hyper-V, but it won’t be available before Q4 2010. vFoglight Storage 1.0 leverages the Vizioncore monitoring engine and GUI to control the physical storage layer, providing details about the topology (relation between arrays and datastores) and performance of SAN arrays in the virtual infrastructure. The product ships with pre-defined alerts and reports helpful to understand when the capacity thresholds are matched. vFoglight Storage provides Latency, I/O / sec and MB / sec, number of read and writes as performance metrics, as well as size, used/committed and number/amount of entities as capacity metrics. The data history is limited to just 30 days. Customers can expand that only by integrating the product with vFoglight. First version of the product doesn’t support all kind of storage vendors. NetApp filers (both Fibre Channel and iSCSI), through the DataOnTap API, and EMC CLARiiON CX3 and CX4 SANs (both Fibre Channel and iSCSI) are supported. During the whole 2011 Quest will extend support to HP, Dell, IBM, Hitachi and other EMC SANs. Support for fabric switches is limited too: only Brocade and Cisco Fibre Channel switches are supported right now. Quite interestingly, while the product can be installed on any VMware virtual machine, Quest recommends to run it on physical hosts when it has to monitor large virtual infrastructures (e.g.: 4 clusters with 6 ESX hosts each). Quest sells vFoglight Storage at $499 per CPU socket. Labels: Platform Monitoring , Quest , Releases , Vizioncore

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In May Microsoft finally unveiled an upcoming, revamped version of its patch management solution for virtual infrastructures: Virtual Machine Servicing Tool (VMST) 3.0 VMST is not a patching tool per se, but rather a connector that allows seamless integration between Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and Hyper-V. The first beta introduced much wanted features like the ability to patch offline VMs and templates in the SCVMM library, or the support for Live Migration. The second beta, appeared less than a month after , just fixed an issue with the template VHD update feature. The third beta, which was announced last week, seems just for additional bug fixing. Labels: Microsoft , Patch Management

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In November 2008 Microsoft unveiled that the upcoming version of its worldwide popular IDE, Visual Studio 2010, was designed to orchestrate Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) to provide a fully integrated virtual lab automation (VLA) environment. Marketed at that time as a stand-alone edition, and called Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management, the first beta of this product appeared in June 2009 , while  the second beta went public in November 2009 . Now it finally seems that Microsoft is ready to release the product: earlier this week in fact, during its Visual Studio Live! event, Microsoft announced that its VLA platform will be available for web download at the end of August. There’s a last minute change anyway: the product is no more a stand-alone edition of Visual Studio 2010 but it’s included in Ultimate and Test Professional editions. Labels: Microsoft , Virtual Lab Automation

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As virtualization.info reported earlier today, VMware is about to significantly change the architecture of its virtual infrastructure . Before that transformation, which customers won’t see before 2011 probably, the company will change another key aspect of its offering: the pricing model. Along with the release of vSphere 4.1 in fact VMware announced today a new per-VM licensing that will take effect starting September 1, 2010: VMware vCenter AppSpeed, VMware vCenter Chargeback, and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager will be sold in VM packs on a per VM basis starting on September 1, 2010. VMware vCenter Application Discovery Manager and VMware vCenter Configuration Manager are already licensed on both a per VM and physical server model. Per VM licensing for VMware vCenter CapacityIQ will take effect in the fourth quarter of 2010. The minimum number of virtual machine licenses in a licensing pack is 25, reports IT News . vCenter will continue to be priced per-Server, but for how long? It’s easy to guess that the per-VM licensing will be extended to the key tier of the virtual infrastructure as soon as the next version of vSphere will be out.

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Just a few hours ago, during his keynote at the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) 2010, Bob Muglia, President of Server and Tools Business division, announced the release candidate of a new add-on for System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2: Self-Service Portal 2.0 (VMMSSP). VMMSSP is a stand-alone product and not an upgrade for the current version of the SCVMM self-service portal. The two portals can coexist. VMMSSP has the following features: Configuration and allocation of datacenter resources: Store management and configuration information related to compute, network and storage resources as assets in the VMMSSP database. Customization of virtual machine actions: Provide a simple web-based interface to extend the default virtual machine actions; for example, you can add scripts that interact with Storage Area Networks for rapid deployment of virtual machines. Business unit on-boarding: Standardized forms and a simple workflow for registering and approving or rejecting business units to enroll in the portal. Infrastructure request and change management: Standardized forms and human-driven workflow that results in reducing the time needed to provision infrastructures in your environment. Self-Service provisioning: Supports bulk creation of virtual machines on provisioned infrastructure through the web-based interface.Helps business units to manage their virtual machines based on delegated roles. Additionally, VMMSSP 2.0 can be extended by ISVs through XML:

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The Virtual Machine Company has begun offering Check Point Software Technologies VPN-1 VE security as an option on its pre-configured Virtualization Appliances. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

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Last week Microsoft released the second beta of its offline patching solution for virtual infrastructures, dubbed Virtual Machine Servicing Tool (VMST) 3.0. Less than a month ago the first beta came out . What’s changed since that release is just a fixed issue in the Template VHD update feature.

A few hours ago SD Times published an interesting article revealing that SpringSource, the subsidiary that VMware acquired in August 2009 to lead its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud computing strategy, is about to acquire GemStone Systems . The article has been removed just a few minutes after the publication but it was too late. The Google News bot has been quicker and redistributed the first few lines of the piece: Rod Johnson, general manager of VMware’s SpringSource division, said that the GemStone acquisition is intended to round out the VMware Java middleware … The way the sentence is wrote clarifies that this is not a rumor. Probably SD Times removed it just because the news was mistakenly published before the VMware’s embargo expired. GemStone Systems (formerly Servio Logic) originally developed a proprietary application framework for Smalltalk. The company now offers the GemFire platform, marketed as an enterprise data fabric . GemFire is a fault-tolerant, distributed system that pools memory, CPU, network and optionally storage, to store and manage application objects and behavior. Something otherwise called distributed object cache . GemFire can be plugged into any Java virtual machine and is especially useful to achieve better database performance in financial applications. The biggest competitors of GemStone Systems are Oracle (thanks to the acquisition of Tangasol in March 2007), GigaSpaces and Microsoft (with Velocity). SpringSource already acquired other three companies: Hyperic (this was well before the VMware acquisition but virtualisation.info got rumors that VMware specifically required and funded that deal), CloudFoundry and Rabbit Technologies, just three weeks ago . Update: The Register and other publications confirm the acquisition. Additionally, it’s worth to highlight that VMware hired the creator and lead developer of Redis , a high-performance database that completely resides in RAM.

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After releasing version 2.1 in December 2009 , Microsoft is preparing to launch a major new version of its virtual machines patch management tool: Virtual Machine Servicing Tool (VMST). VMST 3.0, currently in beta , introduces a number of interesting features like: Patching of offline virtual machines in a System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) library Patching of stopped and saved state virtual machines on a host Patching of virtual machine templates Support for manual copy of update packages into offline virtual hard disks in a SCVMM library Support Hyper-V Live Migration (requires Windows Server 2008 R2 failover clusters)

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Yesterday Microsoft announced the release of System Center Essentials (SCE) 2010 and System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) 2010. The new version of SCE is based on the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 engine, and so it supports physical-to-virtual (P2V) migrations, virtual-to-virtual (V2V) migrations of VMware virtual machines, Live Migration, PRO workload optimization technology, and a number of additional things: Additionally, the maximum number of Windows Server devices that SCE can manage has been raised from 30 to 50.

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