Embotics and Surgient are among a growing number of virtualization management software vendors rolling out announcements ahead of VMworld. The two are teaming up to help businesses get a better grasp on their virtual infrastructures as those environments grow. VMLogix is unveiling the latest generation of its LabManager product, while a new package of software from VKernel is designed to help businesses run their virtualization environments more efficiently.Vendors continue to roll out virtualization software in the days leading up to
the VMworld show, the largest virtualization-focused tech conference, to be
held Aug. 31 to Sept. 3 in San Francisco.
Embotics and Surgient on Aug. 27 announced a partnership designed to give
users greater life-cycle management and self-service provisioning capabilities
in their virtualized environments. Officials with the companies said the
combination of their products gives customers greater control over their
growing virtualization infrastructures.
On the same day, VMLogix unveiled the latest version of its flagship
product, LabManager 3.8, designed to make it easier for test and development
teams to deploy production-ready virtual environments across virtualization
platforms. LabManager 3.8 also offers support for VMware's vSphere 4 platform.
Both announcements came two days after VKernel rolled out a package of
software that officials say will enable users to increase the efficiency of
their virtualized environments.
To Embotics and Surgient officials, problems arise when IT departments,
using a variety of manual controls, are unable to keep up with the growth of
their virtualized environments. The result is that users, frustrated by the
lack of services from the IT department, start creating their own virtual
machines outside of IT's control.
Surgient's Virtual Automation Platform gives IT administrators greater
automation of key aspects, such as predefined virtual configurations accessed
through a portal, the companies said. Users also can more easily get the
resources they need from infrastructure pools managed by the IT staff, which
lessens the need to create rogue VMs.
For its part, Embotics'
V-Commander gives IT administrators greater insight and control over their
virtualized infrastructures, making it easier for them to find such rogue VMs
and bring them under the purview of the IT department.
"The combination of Surgient's self-service provisioning and management
platform with our automation and control reduces support costs, increases
operational flexibility and enables enterprise IT to scale virtual environments
in a safe and secure manner," Jay Litkey, president and CEO
of Embotics, said in a statement.
VMLogix officials said their LabManager product can help businesses reduce
the time and IT resources needed to create applications. Included in Version
3.8 is support for VMware's vCenter Server 4.0 and vSphere, giving users the
latest in VMware's virtualization offerings and access to such management
capabilities as VMotion, which enables users to more easily move VMs from one
physical host to another.
In addition, the new version supports the shared cluster capabilities in
Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization technology, lets users set custom firewall
rules and enables users to deploy IP-zoned enabled LabManager configurations to
be deployed across multiple physical machines.
For its part, VKernel's Optimization Pack offers three applets aimed at
improving the efficiency of a business' virtual infrastructure. The appletsWastefinder,
Rightsizer and Inventoryenable businesses to run more VMs on the same amount
of physical hardware, reduce wasted storage and virtualization sprawl, and
improve the performance of the VMs. The applets are delivered as a virtual
appliance.
Wastefinder hunts down such issues as zombie VMs and expired snapshots that
waste resources such as processor power, memory and storage. Rightsizer brings
the amount of resources in line with the demands of VMs to improve densities
and performance.
Inventory gathers all the data about the VMs in the environment and creates
a detailed report to give users a view into their virtual infrastructure. The
reports are continually updated.
VKernel's products currently support VMware's ESX and vSphere platforms,
with plans to add support for Microsoft's Hyper-V and Citrix Systems' XenServer
in the future.
Virtualization 
