Vizioncore Reaches Beyond VMware with Management Tools

Published: September 11, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Life is funny. Back in 2002, a systems management startup called Vizioncore was established in Chicago as a consultancy in the virtualization field, targeting the remote connectivity products of Citrix Systems and the then little-known desktop virtualization products of a small company called VMware. A few years later, the company stopped worrying about Citrix products, and focused solely on tools to manage VMware hypervisors. And now, as Vizioncore expands out to other virtual machine hypervisors, including Xen, it is coming full circle back into the Citrix fold.

The reason this is true, of course, is that last month Citrix agreed to pay $500 million to acquire XenSource, the commercial entity behind the open source Xen hypervisor. And this was just about the time that XenEnterprise, the company's flagship server hypervisor for Linux and Windows, was getting set to launch with a V4 release and Xen was going to go mainstream. This was also when Vizioncore had decided to move its virtualization management tools beyond supporting VMware's ESX Server and toward other hypervisors, including Xen and Microsoft's future "Viridian" hypervisor for Windows Server 2008.

According to David Bieneman, chief executive officer at Vizioncore, the story is actually a little more complicated. Sometime earlier this year, Windows systems management company Quest Software, which is publicly traded and which has a market capitalization of $1.5 billion, acquired a majority stake in Vizioncore. Quest has been operating Vizioncore as a separate subsidiary, and has let the 70 people at the company do what they do--make and sell products that make it easier to manage virtual server sprawl. Bieneman sold his stock to Quest to help grow the company. In July, Quest acquired another company called Invirtus, which provides physical-to-virtual (P2V) and virtual-to-virtual (V2V) conversion tools to change physical servers into virtual machines that run on VMware's ESX Server, Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005, and Virtual Iron's Virtual Iron 3 and 4 hypervisors, and Quest compelled Vizioncore and Invirtus to work together to create a unified virtualization management suite.

So last week, ahead of the VMworld 2007 trade show this week in San Francisco, Vizioncore announced that it is merging the two product lines under the Vizioncore umbrella and providing a new naming scheme as it expands out beyond VMware's ESX Server. Invirtus had about 1,200 customers using its P2V tools as well as a number of other programs, and Vizioncore has over 4,500 customers using its esxRanger backup software for ESX Server virtual machines. Now, Quest has designated Vizioncore as the sole, global distributor of the Invirtus products, and is providing a united naming scheme for the products. (Why Quest doesn't just merge the two companies is a mystery, since it controls both, but it probably has to do with existing alliances and contracts, or some accounting issue that makes it more desirable for Quest to keep them separate.)

At any rate, on the Vizioncore side of the product line is vRanger, followed by vCharter, a virtualization performance monitor; vReplicator, which makes replicated copies of running VMs; vMigrator, which migrates virtual machines to new hardware platforms; and vEssentials, a bundle of vRanger, vReplicator, and vCharter. The Invirtus tools have now been renamed as well, including vOptimizer, formerly VM Optimizer, which compresses the file behind a virtual machine; vConverter, the company's P2V and V2V tool; vPackager, formerly Libra, which makes use of VMware's Snapshot and Microsoft's Difference Disk snapshotting tools to make virtual machine replications distributable as changed files instead of full files; only the blocks in the disk files that change are moved around in the network.

According to Bieneman, Vizioncore is working on a V2P conversion tool that would allow customers who have virtual machine images to deploy them as the sole operating system and application stack on a physical server. This capability would allow companies that do not want to deploy virtualized servers--or cannot because of the I/O needs of those applications--to nonetheless take a snapshot of a running physical box after converting it to a virtual box and then, if need be, redeploy it as a physical box somewhere else from the virtual instance. This capability, which is based on vConverter, is expected to be ready by the first quarter of 2008, but Bieneman says that it could be ready earlier.

The consolidated Vizioncore product line, which only supported ESX Server, will be expanded to support Virtual Iron, Xen, and Viridian, and do so with the expertise from Invirtus. Anything that currently supports Virtual Server 2005 in the Vizioncore lineup will continue to do so, but going forward, Vizioncore will focus on Viridian on the Microsoft front. XenEnterprise and ESX Server also support Windows in addition to Linux, and ESX Server does Windows and Linux plus Solaris 10 and NetWare. Vizioncore will add some support for backups of VMware Server guest images (VMware Server is the freebie, hosted version of VMware's hypervisor), and it does not have any plans to support Xen hypervisors inside Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. If customers demand it, Bieneman says it can quickly add such support, however.

As part of last week's announcements, Vizioncore says that vRanger 3.2 is now integrated into Microsoft's Volume Shadow Services for the Windows platform, which allows vRanger to get Windows to clean up open writes and otherwise quiesce a virtual machine running on Windows before it performs a backup of that VM. The software also includes a new VMware kernel driver that boosts the performance of ESX Server slice backups and restores by as much as 50 percent.

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