Dell Upgrades Foglight for Virtualization Management Suite

Dell is updating its suite of virtualization management software, just in time for next week’s VMworld 2013 show in San Francisco.

The enhanced Foglight for Virtualization offerings, which Dell inherited when it bought Quest Software last year for $2.4 billion, includes upgraded support for virtualization products from VMware and the ability to sniff out and get rid of issues—from powered-off virtual machines (VMs) to abandoned images to zombie VMs—that sap infrastructure resources, improving efficiency and performance.

The goal is to give infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals the tools to manage the increasing—and seemingly contradictory—demands of delivering more business value and agility while reducing costs in the data center, according to John Maxwell, executive director of product management for Dell Software.

“This ‘deliver more with less’ conundrum is about having the ability to quickly and agilely scale the capacity of the data center up or down as business requirements change at the lowest possible cost,” Maxwell said in a statement.

Dell’s Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition 7.0 includes support for VMware’s vCloud Director for monitoring and optimizing private cloud implementations, VMware’s View for complete visibility into the performance of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments, and vSphere 5.5, for all VMware platforms.

The upgraded optimization functionality in the Dell software enables I&O professionals to better consolidate their data center resources and optimize the CPU, memory and storage through improved visibility and analytics that will help them find waste and get rid of it, according to Dell officials.

Foglight for Virtualization, Standard Edition 7.0 is aimed at small and midsize businesses (SMBs), giving administrators greater insight into their virtual environments. The software gives the administrators a better idea of how resources are being used and how to better utilize them through capacity planning, chargeback and showback. It includes an improved user interface, new capacity planning features, a new power minimization capability that makes it easier to determine the minimum number of host servers needed to run workloads and powering down unneeded servers, and optimization features to automatically adjust virtual machine disk sizes based on use.

Foglight for Storage Management 3.0 gives administrators a full view of what’s in the underlying physical storage infrastructure, which enables them to identify hosts, VMs and data stores that are having trouble and to fix the problems.

The enhanced offerings are expected to be available Aug. 31.