This morning we had a meeting with Vizioncore/Quest. Danny Claproth and Jan-Willem Koppers informed us on their complete range of vProducts.

Vizioncore offers a wide range of products which add additional features or deliver VMware-like features. I’ve not had very much time to test their products yet but I knew most of them by name and function. After attending Danny’s presentation I will definitely make time to check out their neat products.

The ones I will definitely check out are vFoglight, vOptimizer, vConverter and of course Virtualization EcoShell.

vFoglight
From what I saw vFoglight is a brilliant virtualization management solution which delivers performance-, capacity- and cost monitoring to improve resource utilization, recover costs and quickly find bottlenecks in your infrastructure.

vFoglight is offered in two editions – vFoglight Standard (SE) and vFoglight Pro. vFoglight SE is designed to help organizations monitor the performance of their virtual infrastructures. vFoglight Pro includes all the features of vFoglight SE and adds advanced capabilities for Capacity Planning, Chargeback, Physical Operating System (OS) Monitoring, Third-Party Integration and more.

vOptimizer
vOptimizer is a freeware product that scans through vCenter to locate over allocated virtual storage and misaligned virtual machines. It allows you to determine whether you are wasting expensive storage space. In an ROI report savings are calculated using customer provided storage costs and free space requirements to ensure accuracy. vOptimizer can also locate virtual machines which aren’t properly aligned which causes decreased I/O throughput and higher latency.

vConverter
vConverter is comparable with VMware Converter but with some extra options. vConverter is a P2V/V2V conversion solution with the possibility to schedule multiple P2V or V2V actions and even keep the physical server and it’s virtual clone in sync. And the coolest feature is vConverter DR, with this you can keep a physical server and  it’s virtual clone in sync permanently to provide an active/passive disaster recovery solution.

And of course Virtualization EcoShell (VESI)
Virtualization EcoShell is a freeware desktop application, created by Scott Herold (our VMGuru-dad), which enables you to use the full potential of your virtual infrastructure and reduce the daily operating costs of managing multi-platform environments. In the basis VESI is an evolution of Quest’s PowerGUI which provides a very powerful and easy way to create powershell scripting and manage your virtual infrastructure in a very easy way. You can easily create powershell scripts to perform actions which in vCenter are very time consuming. I can definitely confirm the ease and power of VESI, I’m allergic to anything that smells like scripting or programming, but with VESI even I can create powershell scripts and look as smart as my colleagues ;-).

So, a wide range of vProducts, four of which I want to test drive in the near future. The other Vizioncore products are also worth checking out but I can use the four mentioned above in my everyday work immediately.
I will certainly keep you all posted on my experiences with the Vizioncore products.

Thanks to Danny and Jan-Willem for their presentation and for introducing me and my Centric colleagues to a range of interesting and useful products.