Vizioncore Offers Free VMware Management Pack

As many companies battle tight IT budgets, Vizioncore has released Quest Management Pack for VMware, a free management pack on that extends Microsoft System Center Operations Manager to monitor VMware virtual infrastructure.

Vizioncore is a subsidiary of Quest Software, and the solution offers free community support with paid product support as an option.

By standardising on Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, the end-to-end centralised monitoring framework for physical and virtual IT environments, organisations have been able to significantly reduce overall management costs, the company explained.

VMware Monitoring

Quest Management Pack for VMware simply extends this centralised monitoring into VMware virtual infrastructures, offering the ability to detect, diagnose and resolve problems affecting the performance and availability of the IT infrastructure.

Dick Csaplar, senior research analyst for virtualisation and storage at Aberdeen Group, said their research shows that most organisations with server virtualisation have used VMware hypervisors running on Windows-based servers. “Vizioncore is filling a very large gap between two major players in virtualisation,” he said. “With the Quest Management Pack for VMware, capturing and reporting VMware performance and availability information allows users of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager to get the entire picture of their virtualised environment.”

Quest Management Pack for VMware is offered by Vizioncore as a freeware solution with optional paid support. Support pricing includes both 1-year and 3-year options, set at $99 (£64) per socket and $238 (£153) per socket, respectively.

Free Of Charge

Steve Stover, senior director, product management, at Vizioncore, explained for the organisations that utilise Microsoft System Center Operations Manager as their primary monitoring framework, extending support to VMware virtual infrastructures makes Quest Management pack for VMware a vital offering.

Stover said a process of low overhead collection has enabled the Quest Management Pack for VMware to ensure minimal contention between monitoring and critical workloads that run in the monitoring system, enabling Vizioncore to extend support to VMware virtual infrastructures.

“We are able to offer for free what many vendors would be charging for, enabling administrators managing virtual infrastructures to simply download this management pack and immediately wrap value around it for the benefit of their organisations,” he said.