Back in November, InfoWorld reported on Quest Software's acquisition of VKernel, a competitor that, like Quest, provided a suite of management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments. At the time, the official announcement provided very little information about the acquisition itself, let alone any product road map discussions. However, VKernel representatives came forward to say it would be business as usual for VKernel after the acquisition, except the company would have the full backing of its now much larger parent company, Quest.
But after initially hearing the news of the acquisition, one of the questions that immediately came to mind was what would Quest do with two competing virtualization management solutions. Today, nearly four months later, it looks as though that question has finally been answered.
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VKernel, now a subsidiary of Quest Software, announced the expansion of its vOperations Suite (vOPS). This latest version of vOPS will now include products from its parent company such as Quest vFoglight, vFoglight Storage, and vOptimizer. This new combination will provide a single solution for VM administrators to manage all infrastructure areas related to their virtualized data centers and cloud environments.
Specifically, the unified vOperations Suite will now extend monitoring capabilities to:
- The storage area network (SAN)
- The guest OS inside a VMware or Hyper-V virtual machine
- Physical servers that have not been virtualized
- Application-level monitoring
The new suite is built around two product lines: vOperations Server and vOperations Storage.
vOperations Server is offered in three editions: The free version called Explorer provides basic monitoring of a virtualized environment with regards to performance, capacity, or efficiency issues of VMs, hosts, and datastores. A Standard edition provides remediation of those issues, as well as virtual server performance analysis, capacity management, optimization, and chargeback. Beyond those features offered in the Standard edition, an Enterprise edition adds near real-time application monitoring, as well as monitoring of the guest OS and the physical servers. Standard is priced at $549 per socket and Enterprise is $799 per socket.
vOperations Storage offers two editions: Monitor, designed for administrators needing deep visibility into the SAN, visualizes the topology from VM to disk, highlights where issues are present and the root causes to the problems; and vOptimizer, which helps remediate storage issues through automation capabilities. Monitor is priced at $499 per socket, while vOptimizer is $299 per socket.
"Virtualization administrators have long searched for a data center management system to gain visibility across the many layers that make up a virtualized environment: from storage array to guest OS," said Bryan Semple, chief marketing officer at VKernel. "Previous attempts to gain this holistic visibility have either required multiple vendors, or have involved complex large-scale management platforms that are time consuming and not cost efficient."