Dell Foglight Upgraded For Virtualisation Management

Dell has made a timely upgrade ahead of next week’s VMworld 2013 show in San Francisco, after it upgraded its suite of virtualisation management software.

The enhanced Foglight for Virtualization offerings, which Dell inherited when it bought Quest Software last year for $2.4 billion (£1.5bn), includes upgraded support for virtualisation 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.

Resource Management

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 centre, 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 centre 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 optimising 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 optimisation functionality in the Dell software enables I&O professionals to better consolidate their data centre resources and optimise 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.

SMB Market

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 utilise them through capacity planning, chargeback and showback.

It includes an improved user interface, new capacity planning features, a new power minimisation capability that makes it easier to determine the minimum number of host servers needed to run workloads and powering down unneeded servers, and optimisation 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 31 August.

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