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Virtualization minnow goes agnostic

Thinks broad and deep

With VirtualIQ Pro 3, VMware's ESX Server, ESXi, VMware Server, and GSX Server hypervisors are all supported. So, too, is XenServer from Citrix, Hyper-V for Windows Server 2008 from Microsoft as well as Virtual Server 2005 R2, the Oracle VM standalone implementation of the Xen hypervisor, and the integrated Xen in SLES 10 from Novell. Red Hat is conspicuously absent from support, of course, as is the KVM hypervisor that Red Hat is shifting to as it moves away from Xen.

VirtualIQ Pro 3 has three components. A web console for managing VMs and hypervisors, data collection servers - written in a variety of languages, tuned for particular hypervisors and operating systems - and a database for storing the information about the VMs and hypervisors.

The bulk of VirtualIQ Pro is written in Java, according to Pabari, with some other languages used for data collection. The program is agentless, which is something a lot of IT shops are looking for because no one wants the overhead of an agent running on VMs, and can be installed on a Windows or Linux box.

The tool does physical and virtual machine asset discovery and builds an inventory of what is out there on the network. It also includes a physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration analyzer, which suggests workloads that might be virtualized and where they might be deployed given the physical servers and licensed hypervisors, and analytics for the virtual environments that helps admins cope with resource bottlenecks.

Mighty push

VirtualIQ Pro also includes a policy engine that can be used to provision, shut down, start or migrate VMs automatically. The tool also has role-based access to give different levels of access to different users. For instance, programmers might be able to deploy a test stack of software, but not deploy to production machines.

VirtualIQ Pro 3 is available now, and is priced $199 per processor socket. The tool is not open source, but a freeware version that can support up to five machines or 25 VMs for as long as a year is available for tire-kickers and cheapskates.

Marinez said that with VirtualIQ Pro 3, the company is now ready to do a big push because it supports enough hypervisors at the same time as companies are starting to use multiple hypervisors. The company has about 30 paying customers, and has had 700 downloads of its prior products.

It is a beginning. ®

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