uXcomm Buys Virtugo to Bolster Virtualization Management

Published: April 10, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Systems management software maker uXcomm has acquired a relatively unknown startup with software for managing virtual and logical server instances called Virtugo to expand its offerings for managing virtual servers.

uXcomm was founded in 2003, and worked for a number of years creating the engine behind its systems management tool, which came to market in early 2006 as XManage 1.0 and which was updated last fall with the XManage 2.0 release. With the kicker XManage 2.1 release late last year, uXcomm was able to discover, monitor, and manage not only physical servers out there on the network, but also instances of virtual machines and the operating systems embedded inside of them using the Xen hypervisor from XenSource. Rather than sell XManage directly, uXcomm is selling its software as a bundle that allows other vendors to rebrand the tool and offer it as standalone management appliances or as part of their server offerings. (Linux clustered server maker Penguin Computing has licensed XManage, for instance.)

While uXcomm has focused on physical servers and moved out into Xen partitions, Virtugo created a set of software that could monitor and optimize VMware partitions, mostly on Windows boxes, and integrate with Microsoft's Operations Manager software for Windows. The VirtualSuite package can allocate CPU, memory, and disk storage resources on a VMware partition in real time (and works as a complement to VMware's own VirtualCenter management tools), and it includes a rules-based engine that stores policies to automatically track who is using what IT assets inside the virtual machines and charge back the costs of those resources to the department and end users who consumed them. VirtualSuite also included capacity planning and resource capacity planning tools.

According to Earl Hines, director of product marketing at uXcomm, Virtugo was out looking for its first round of venture capital funding when uXcomm decided that it would be a better idea to buy the company's key assets for itself. Virtugo and uXcomm had some common customers and knew each other, so uXcomm hired the key employees at the firm who developed the software and the intellectual property rights to the VirtualSuite software. One of the benefits of the VirtualSuite product is that it is more scalable than VirtualCenter, which can only handle about 500 server instances; Virtugo was already working on support to manage Virtual Server 2005 instances, which is due in the third quarter of this year, and support for Xen partitions on both Linux and Windows can't be far behind.

Both uXcomm and Virtugo are private companies, so financial terms of the Virtugo acquisition were not divulged. Hines says that there are no plans to merge the products, and that it will continue to sell VirtualSuite to end user customers and XManage to OEMs and system builders.

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