Vizioncore Offers Free Insight Into Virtual Infrastructure

Vizioncore is offering a free monitoring tool that will provide IT personnel with an insight into the state of their virtual infrastructure.

vFoglight QuickView is the free edition of Vizioncore’s vFoglight virtualisation management offering. Essentially, it is a monitoring solution that provides alerts and data to help enable administrators to quickly detect, diagnose and resolve issues within their virtual infrastructure.

Based on technology from Quest Software (Vizioncore’s owner), vFoglight QuickView offers real-time visibility and understanding of the state of the virtual infrastructure and its dependencies. Other features include performance reporting to help identify resource contention and other issues that affect performance and availability and a user interface (UI) built expressly for VM administrators.

Monitoring And Reporting

“vFoglight QuickView gives virtual administrators the tools to grasp and manage the complexities inherent within highly virtualised environments,” said Steve Stover, senior director of product management for Vizioncore. “The availability of a free tool of this calibre, which provides visibility, monitoring and reporting for understanding the performance and availability of virtual environments, is of paramount importance to our customers as they continue to deploy and grow server neutralization.”

Vizioncore provides a migration from vFoglight QuickView to the full-featured vFoglight by extending performance monitoring while adding capacity planning, chargeback and service management for greater visibility and control of virtual infrastructures.

“Right out of the box, vFoglight QuickView gave us full visibility into our virtualised cloud environment,” said Chadd Warwick, a systems architect with CSS Hosted Systems. “Instead of spending hours searching through logs to find the source of a problem, vFoglight QuickView gives us the visibility and ability to identify the root cause in minutes. The reporting capabilities have allowed us to provide daily summaries to management on utilisation against our investment. We were also able to reclaim over 400GB from snapshots we didn’t know about.”

According to a report from technology analyst firm Gartner, the server virtualisation management market will exceed $3.3 billion in annual revenue by 2013. In addition, Gartner states the hypervisor is rapidly becoming a “zero cost” item, with functionality moving to hardware.

Virtual Complexities

Stover said VM administrators often struggle to understand the performance of their virtual environment and need both tools and techniques to resolve common infrastructure problems. “Having this capability without the risk of costly implementations and license fees is a huge benefit,” he said. “The Vizioncore vCommunity allows users to collaborate with their peers while better understanding how vFoglight QuickView can improve their operational efficiency.”

In late May, the company introduced vRanger Pro Data Protection Platform (DPP).

Version 4.5 of the image-based data protection technology features Active Block Mapping (ABM) accompanied by Change Block Tracking (CBT). ABM queries the Windows OS to remove inactive blocks from read lists during backups, which accelerates the data-collection process by an average of 49 percent compared with vRanger Pro 4.2.3. ABM works on its own to speed full backups, typically performed weekly by Vizioncore customers. ABM also works in combination with CBT to speed incremental and differential backups, typically performed nightly.