Vizioncore Updates Management Tools for VMware's Virtualization

Corrected: April 17, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While Linux is certainly an increasingly popular operating system among corporations, the raw number of Windows servers and, more importantly, Windows administrators utterly dwarfs similar metrics for Linux servers and admins. Vizioncore, a maker of add-on software for VMware's popular ESX Server virtual machine hypervisor, has created a set of graphical tools that help Linux newbies use Linux and ESX Server without having to use the dreaded command line interface.

This week, Vizioncore is updating its esxReplicator server with a 2.0 release, which interfaces with VMware's ESX Server 3 hypervisor and which is at the heart of the Infrastructure 3 products that were announced last June. Vizioncore, which was founded in 2002 as a virtualization consultancy, transformed itself into a tool provider with the launch of the esxRanger product two years ago, which is a backup and restore tool for ESX Server. The company has just released esxCharter 2.0 earlier this year, which was retrofitted for the ESX Server 3 and Infrastructure 3 products from VMware and which are used to monitor and manage ESX Server and its VMs through a graphical environment on a Linux platform; the products also work on Windows servers, of course. The company also sells a product called esxMigrator, which migrates live instances of ESX Server 2.X to ESX Server 3. esxRanger costs $500 per CPU socket on the host machine, while esxCharter costs $300 per socket and esxReplicator costs $500 per VM that it is licensed to replicate. esxMigrator costs $1,000 for migrating 25 VMs, and an unlimited license is available for $7,500. According to Chris Akerberg, vice president of global sales and marketing at Vizioncore, the company has over 3,200 customers and has sold over 30,000 licenses of its software in the past two years.

As the name suggests, esxReplicator is used to replicate virtual machine images so they can be quickly moved between a primary and a backup machine equipped with ESX Server. A virtual machine is, after all, nothing more than a large, single file residing in memory and on a hard disk, and moving the file over a LAN or WAN is not, in theory, that big of a deal. (Until you try to write your own scripts to do this in Linux, of course.) While other virtual machine replication products take a snapshot of a single virtualized host machine and replicate that, esxReplicator 2.0, a kicker to the first pass of the product that was announced for ESX Server 2.X last April, replicates at the level of a single virtual machine. Admins can take a snapshot of VMs and replicate them at different time intervals, depending on the sensitivity of the data and applications they have in them. esxReplicator 2.0 is also aware of the VMotion live migration feature of ESX Server 3, which allows a running virtual machine to be passed from one physical server to another--provided both servers are attached to the same iSCSI or SAN storage. esxReplicator 2.0 only works with ESX Server 3; ESX Server 2.X is not supported.

While it is understandable that Vizioncore is looking for a niche all to itself in the Linux market for admins who are used to GUI tools and Windows, the company does not have any plans as yet to expand beyond the VMware ESX Server hypervisor on Linux or Windows. But Akerberg says that the company has been in strategic talks with Microsoft, XenSource, and Virtual Iron to see how it might evolve its products to work with their virtualization products.

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VMware Offers New Packaging and Pricing with ESX Server 3

This story has been corrected since it originally ran. Vizioncore supports its ESX Server-related management tools on Windows as well as on Linux. IT Jungle regrets the error.

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