Today at the Microsoft Tech•Ed EMEA IT Professionals show in Barcelona, Spain, Emulex announced a new Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) add-on for Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (VMM2008) that, according to an Emulex press release, "extends PRO with storage related events and alerts customers to changes in I/O rates flowing through the [storage] adapter."
Microsoft VMM2008 is part of Microsoft's strategy to challenge rival virtualization vendor VMware's dominance in the enterprise datacenter. VMM2008 can be used in conjunction with other Microsoft System Center products to manage both physical and virtual machines. In addition to Hyper-V support, VMM2008 can also manage VMs created by ESX Server and Microsoft Virtual Server.
In a statement supporting the release of the new Emulex add-on, Dai Vu, director of integrated virtualization marketing at Microsoft, said that "System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 enables customers to configure and deploy new virtual machines and centrally manage them, whether running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or VMware ESX Server...Emulex is an early adopter of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and its incorporation of the PRO feature enhances data center application performance, helping our customers meet the resource demands of server virtualization and Windows Hyper-V."
Emulex says that the new management pack for PRO--when combined with Emulex's LightPulse adapters--allows IT pros to manage virtualized server allocation, monitor I/O traffic rates, and keep tabs on service-level alert notifications. Combined with VMM2008, this new add-on allows actions based on pre-defined criteria to take place, such as creating a new VM (or moving an existing one to a physical server) if resource demand increases.
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