Virtualization solutions specialist VMware announced SpringSource Hyperic 4.4, a solution designed for for management and monitoring of custom applications. Through integration with VMware’s vCenter Server, Hyperic 4.4 now maintains a continually updated inventory of the company’s vSphere ESXi and ESX hosts, enabling IT administrators to more rapidly pinpoint, correct and prevent application performance problems when they occur across physical, virtual or private cloud infrastructures.
Hyperic, a key element of SpringSource’s software suite, supports applications running on both physical and virtual infrastructure, providing real-time performance data on more than 75 technologies used to develop modern Web applications. IT operations teams can now use Hyperic to pinpoint the cause of performance issues of applications running on virtualized infrastructure, by providing them with visibility into all application infrastructure layers.
Rachel Chalmers, research director for infrastructure at research firm The 451 Group, said with virtualization, datacenters become increasingly dynamic. "Without virtualization there is no cloud computing," she said. “IT operations teams making this fundamental shift need management tools that understand the whole software stack, from VM through OS to application payload to make sure applications remain up and performing – tools like Hyperic."
Hyperic 4.4 automatically discovers ESX hosts, virtual machines and guest operating systems after their launch, and presents them in a unified topology so users can see which application components are running on which ESX hosts. The company said this eliminates reliance on chronically out-of-date configuration management databases (CMDBs). Additionally, Hyperic detects when virtual machines are moved from one ESX host to another using vMotion and adjusts topologies accordingly.
"Hyperic 4.4 delivers a completely new level of integration with VMware vCenter Server designed to streamline the task of managing virtualized applications," said Javier Soltero, CTO of management products for the SpringSource division of VMware. "Hyperic now provides system administrators complete, automatic visibility of virtual infrastructure resources as well as a completely new user interface built to enable analysis and correlation of every metric and event from VMware vSphere hosts up to the application."
Hyperic can automate common responses to application problems — such as reverting a virtual machine to a snapshot, restarting a virtual machine and rebooting a guest operating system, as well as provide visibility into the log events reported for every virtual machine. Log events provide system awareness for performance data, configuration changes and security action changes, such as when a virtual machine has been reverted to a snapshot. These events can be used to generate alerts, or simply to correlate errors reported in the VMware logs with performance and health indicators elsewhere in the environment.