Rob de Veij has released version 2.8.1 of his stellar virtualization utility RVTools.  I love this free tool as it provides valuable information about my infrastructure in a fast and easy format.

New in this version:
- On vHost tab new field: number of running vCPUs
- On vSphere VMs in vApp where not displayed.
- Filter not working correct when annotations or custum fields contains null value.
- When NTP server(s) = null the time info fields are not displayed on the vHost tabpage.
- When datastore name or virtual machine name containts spaces the inconsistent foldername check was not working correct.
- Tools health check now only executed for running VMs.

Go download this tool today and be sure to tell Rob how much you appreciate his development efforts!

VMware, much of this information is vital as it pertains to configuration maximums and should be available in the VMware vSphere Client for capacity planning purposes.

Hyper9, a virtualization management startup company based out of Austin, TX, is expected to release version 1.4 of its self titled flagship management product on Wednesday. This is an exciting release as many notable improvements have been made to the user interface.

New to this release is a dashboard which is designed to help the end user “hit the ground running” immediately after the product is installed. Upon login, the administrator will immediately presented with the “My Environment” tab of the dashboard. “My Environment” contains many of the most useful canned reports about the environment in which Hyper9 has been instructed to catalog.

If you find “My Environment” is jumping in just a bit too fast, take a look at the “Getting Started” tab which contains several instructional videos that can be launched from within the Hyper9 console.

Veteran Hyper9 users will find that the “Results” display has been cleaned up with no-nonsense resource indicators that are very much appealing to the eyes in my opinion.

Hyper9 has been making great strides with their products and I’ve been very impressed with the amount of end user feedback they have taken to their developers and integrated into future product versions.  Hyper9 is available today on a subscription basis.  Head on over to their site for more information.  While you’re there, be sure to check out their other products, such as the Virtualization Mobile Manager (VMM) which allows administrators to manage their infrastructures from a hand held device.

TRIPWIRE LAUNCHES vWIRE, A VIRTUALIZATION MANAGEMENT SOLUTION TO MONITOR, MANAGE, AND AUTOMATE VIRTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE
vWire gives visibility and control to virtualization engineers to dramatically decrease complexity, downtime, and operational costs in virtual environments.

PORTLAND, Ore. – June 9, 2009 - Tripwire® today announced vWire^TM, the first virtualization management solution to integrate change and configuration awareness into Virtual Infrastructure (VI) management. Solving a real business need for virtualization administrators, vWire continuously monitors the state of virtual systems and correlates data with critical events to provide context and insight into potential issues, and then acts to prevent and resolve problems that cause downtime.

vWire was designed based on direct input from the virtualization community to introduce a greater level of control and visibility over virtual environments. The new offering from Tripwire reduces the time that virtual infrastructure managers spend troubleshooting system failures. With vWire, IT organizations can optimize their virtual infrastructures, decrease downtime and improve reliability, while reducing operating costs through automated monitoring and problem detection.

“Tripwire is working with VMware to provide customers with solutions and tools that offer a holistic view of their virtualized environments while improving operational compliance of these systems,” said Shekar Ayyar, vice president, infrastructure alliances, VMware. “Tripwire’s new vWire extends the robust management capabilities of VMware solutions with capabilities targeted at providing increased visibility and helping troubleshoot problems quickly.”

vWire is easy to set up and requires no special training. Once installed with sufficient licenses and credentials, vWire automatically starts recording and analyzing the status of the entire virtual infrastructure. vWire is comprised of three major components:

• Comprehensive Monitoring and Data Collection – vWire monitors all change, configuration and critical event data, providing a database of up-to-the-minute information that can be quickly accessed, searched, and filtered. vWire complements the availability features of the VMware platform by monitoring systems to help prevent or eliminate virtual system downtime.
• Shared content – vWire data can be accessed with various combinations of filters, scripts and alerts, easily accessed through the vWire dashboard. Administrators can see at a glance the aggregated information that is relevant to ensuring the health of their virtual infrastructure. These capabilities ship with out-of-the box content, but can be easily customized. Users can also import shared content from the community, expanding the library of tools and solutions.
• The vWire community – This online forum provides an opportunity for VI administrators, industry experts and product specialists to share content, expertise and solutions for issues involving the management of virtual systems.

According to Stephen Beaver, co-author of two books on virtualization, “Essential VMware ESX Server” and “Scripting VMware Power Tools: Automating Virtual Infrastructure Administration”, Tripwire Virtualization Evangelist, “virtualization is unique in that there can be thousands of unique configuration properties in a virtual infrastructure, and the number quickly goes up when you consider multiple objects. For example, a moderately small installation with two clusters, six ESX hosts, and 60 VMs will have 38,700 configuration properties for the clusters, hosts, and VMs. vWire’s configuration automation gives virtual administrators new visibility to effectively monitor and manage configuration, change and performance data across the virtual infrastructure – all from within VMware vCenter^TM Server.”

vWire is available for immediate purchase and download at www.vwire.com. Also available at vWire.com are two free, downloadable tools to help manage virtualized infrastructure: OpsCheck, which helps ensure systems are configured to support VMware VMotion^TM by rapidly analyzing ESX 3.0, 3.5, and ESXi hypervisors; and, ConfigCheck, which helps ensure VMware environments are properly configured, a recommended and essential first step when deploying and virtualizing additional servers.

Tripwire is the leader in data center compliance and infrastructure management solutions, building confidence for IT across both virtual and physical infrastructures. Tripwire Enterprise and vWire software, helps over 6,500 enterprises worldwide meet their configuration auditing, file integrity monitoring, virtual infrastructure management and change auditing needs for IT operations, security and compliance. Tripwire is headquartered in Portland, Ore. with offices worldwide. Tripwire can be found at www.tripwire.com, www.vwire.com, and @vwire on Twitter.

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©2009, Tripwire, Inc. Tripwire is a registered trademark of Tripwire, Inc. All other marks are property of their respective owners. All rights reserved.

Hyper9 Unveils Eagerly Awaited Flagship Product that Supports the Management of Virtual Infrastructures

While Affordably Priced, Unique Approach Offers Immediate Benefits and Is As Easy To Use as a Consumer Application

Austin, TX (March 18, 2009) – Hyper9, Inc. (www.hyper9.com), the leading provider of solutions that help virtual infrastructure administrators manage their virtualized environments, announced today the general availability of Hyper9, a product that leverages Internet and virtualization management technologies to manage change, configuration and performance issues in a modern, efficient way.

“Today’s VI administrators must navigate a very challenging virtual environment,” said Chris Ostertag, CEO and founder of Hyper9. “Until now, they lacked an efficient way to collect, negotiate and analyze information regarding their virtual server infrastructures. Hyper9 also allows them to customize how they see and manage that information, and as a result work smarter.”

Built for VI administrators by VI administrators, Hyper9 is a simple, yet powerful enterprise-class product that is ideally suited for managing virtual server infrastructures. It enables monitoring, troubleshooting and reporting on virtual infrastructures like nothing else in the marketplace. It accomplishes this without agents, tree views, spreadsheets, or multiple tools.

Among the key product features are:

• Search: Search across your entire virtual universe, from the hypervisor to inside the guest.
• Alert & Monitor: Build queries to monitor your environment from inside the guest and across your virtual infrastructure. Set up alerts to track changes and keep on top of problem solving.
• Compare: Analyze historical data about your virtual machines, such as how they’ve changed over time, with Hyper9 VMDNA^TM.
• Report: Slice and dice data, generate performance charts and reports for management and colleagues.
• Collaborate: Store and manage your searches, lists and reports and invite colleagues into your workspace.

Not surprisingly, the product has earned praise from analysts and beta customers alike.

Gartner Inc. recently included Hyper9 in a report that highlights a handful of innovative technology companies in the “IT operations and virtualization” space. Gartner Analyst Cameron Haight wrote that “Hyper9’s product uses an agentless management approach to gather key data from multiple sources. Current and historical performance information is made available and you can track how virtual machines have changed over time and have alerts issued when configurations have drifted from a standard template.”

Rich Brambley, a leading virtualization expert, blogger (http://vmetc.com/) and an early beta tester of Hyper9, recently described the product on his blog:

“Hyper9 provides some powerful reporting, monitoring, and analysis capabilities. You also have the option to save your searches for reuse again and again. Not only can you use keyword based queries, but there are pre-built criteria for all VI object fields. For example, you can find all VMs based on a version of the VM Tools, whether the CDrom is connected, or the existence of a snapshot.”

“As if that wasn’t enough, Hyper9 also has the ability to compare objects – both for current state analysis and for understanding changes over time. The comparison can take place using the same VM or 2 different VMs. Hyper9 calls this feature VMDNA^TM, and it’s a great feature for examining configuration history.”

In addition to the Hyper9 product being made available at the web site, the H9Labs Search Plug-in for VI Client is also ready for download. This software was developed by a well known developer in the VMware community, Hyper9’s own Andrew Kutz, who was recently named a vExpert by VMware. H9Labs’ Search Plug-in gives the VMware VI Client 2.5 auto-complete search capability from inside the guest across your virtual infrastructure.

Hyper9 is now ready for administrators to download at www.hyper9.com for a free trial or purchase. Pricing for Hyper9 starts as low as $25 a month. The H9Labs Search Plug-in is now available at http://store.hyper9.com/ as a free download.

About Hyper9

Hyper9 is a privately held company backed by Venrock, Matrix Partners, Silverton Partners and Maples Investments. Based in Austin, Texas, the company was founded in 2007 by enterprise systems management experts and virtualization visionaries. Since then, Hyper9 has collaborated with VI Administrators as well as systems and virtualization management experts to develop a new breed of virtualization management products that leverages Internet technologies like search, collaboration and social networking. The end result is a product that helps administrators discover, organize and make use of information in their virtual environment, yet is as easy to use as a consumer application. For more information about Hyper9, visit www.hyper9.com.

All product and company names are trademarks of their respective companies.

Hyper9 Introduces Alert & Monitoring Applet

Applet Makes It Easier and More Affordable for Administrators to Monitor Virtual Environments from Inside the Guest and Across their Virtual Infrastructure

Austin, TX (March 19, 2009) – Hyper9, Inc. (www.hyper9.com), the leading provider of solutions that help virtualization infrastructure administrators manage their environment, introduced today the H9Labs Alert & Monitoring Applet, which makes it easier and more affordable for VI Administrators to solve problems and make better decisions.

The announcement comes on the heels of the company’s launch of its flagship product, which provides administrators with a more holistic view of the virtual infrastructure that they manage. Hyper9, affordably priced at $25 a month, is now available for download at www.hyper9.com, while the add-on applet is free to all Hyper9 trial download users and customers, and can be downloaded at: http://store.hyper9.com/product-add-ons.

The applet allows administrators to monitor and set up alerts against any facet/data point in their virtual environment. More specifically, it provides administrators with the ability to:

• Proactively manage and solve infrastructure challenges;
• Monitor configurations and issue alerts when configurations drift from a standard template; and
• Track, monitor and set up alerts for: new virtual machines, VMs missing important Hotfixes, new applications installed, VMotion activity and more.

“This product reflects the wants and desires of VI Administrators, who have told us that they want an alert and monitoring applet that is both customizable and easy to install,” said Chris Ostertag, CEO and founder of Hyper9. “It also demonstrates our commitment to providing VI Administrators with the products and tools that will help them make smarter decisions when it comes to managing their virtual infrastructure.”

That “commitment” is obvious to at least one administrator.

“As an engineer that manages many different aspects of my environment, I spend only about 30 percent of my day in my VI3 environment, and often do not have my Virtual Infrastructure Client running,” said Jase McCarty, vExpert of McCarty Technical Consulting (http://www.jasemccarty.com/). “The H9Labs Monitoring and Alerting Applet fills an important gap for me, when my attention is focused elsewhere. The ability to create custom alerts for hosts and guests using extended attributes, not available from VMware, with a simple query, is simply awesome. I had several alerts configured in just a few minutes.”

About Hyper9

Hyper9 is a privately held company backed by Venrock, Matrix Partners, Silverton Partners and Maples Investments. Based in Austin, Texas, the company was founded in 2007 by enterprise systems management experts and virtualization visionaries. Since then, Hyper9 has collaborated with VI Administrators as well as systems and virtualization management experts to develop a new breed of virtualization management products that leverages Internet technologies like search, collaboration and social networking. The end result is a product that helps administrators discover, organize and make use of information in their virtual environment, yet is as easy to use as a consumer application. For more information about Hyper9, visit www.hyper9.com.

All product and company names are trademarks of their respective companies.

If you take a look across the starboard side of the blog, you’ll see a new banner for Hyper9. Hyper9 is a startup company in Austin, TX that works in the virtualization infrastructure management space, developing tools that automate the management of virtualization in the datacenter. The current version of their tool “plugs in” to the VMware Virtual Infrastructure Client providing a powerful virtual infrastructure search tool, plus a lot more.

Thank you for your support Hyper9 and welcome aboard!