Network Management

Ipswitch, Inc., developer of the WhatsUp Gold suite of IT management software, will soon be enhancing its virtual infrastructure management tool, WhatsVirtual, a plug-in module that delivers accurate and up-to-date availability and performance information into VMware-based virtual server infrastructures.

The management tool with added features, WhatsVirtual 2.0, available July 13, can integrate with the VMware vSphere API and can manage ESX and ESXi hosts and their associated virtual machines from a single console, and can also support for vCenter, vMotion, High Availability and Virtual Clusters.

"Our customers continue to harness the power of VMware to optimize virtual IT environments and WhatsVirtual gives them the ability to manage all their resources from a single, consolidated dashboard," said Kevin Gillis, vice president of product management, Ipswitch (News - Alert), Inc.'s Network Management division. "We will continue to develop WhatsVirtual as requested by our customers to meet the demands and developing needs of the virtual infrastructure and cloud initiatives."

Key features of Virtual 2.0 will include; vCenter - discovers, monitors and controls all virtual resources through vCenter to offer complete accuracy and reliability; vMotion - monitors live migrations as VMs move across physical servers to ensure a complete, accurate mapping of physical server relations at all times, including historical information and reports combined with powerful alerting capabilities.

Added to this, it gives complete access to historical information and reports, combined with powerful alerting capabilities to track VMs as they are automatically restarted or moved to other physical servers due to hardware or operating system failures. Also it comes with the facility to manage VMware cluster discovery and mapping, configurations, out-of-the-box workspace views, alert center thresholds and Web reports.

WhatsVirtual 1.0 is available now at an introductory price of $1,495. A minimum of WhatsUp Gold 14.2 is required to run WhatsVirtual. The company has also announced a introductory offer to all early entries for a free upgrade to WhatsVirtual 2.0 when it becomes available.