Vizioncore Offers vFoglight QuickView, Free and Clear

To begin building relationships with new potential customers, as well as to gain information for use in future products and functions, Vizioncore has announced a free version of its vFoglight virtualization management software, vFoglight QuickView, which users can download from the company's website. While the software doesn't have all the features of the standard and professional versions, it offers enough features that organizations may never need to pay for the software. Vizioncore is fine with that, according to Mike Condy, product manager for the Hoffman Estates, Ill., company.

"It's been a phenomenal product for us," says Chadd Warwick, systems architect for Comprehensive Software Systems Inc., a Golden, Colo., developer of back-office brokerage software. The organization had actually purchased a copy of vFoglight but hadn't yet implemented it when he read about the beta test of the QuickView version and downloaded it to try out. "It's extremely useful, and we found issues off the bat," he says. He is able to run daily reports for company executives with a summary of information such as top users and available resources, presented in a "nice pretty chart with simple numbers."

The vFoglight QuickView software supports up to 250 virtual servers. It monitors data centers, data stores, clusters, ESX hosts/servers and virtual machines. Compared with VMware's Virtual Center, the software offers a data view that is more consistent with monitoring than administration and provides more of an interpretation of the data, as well as advice on how to deal with it, Condy says. The software provides a half dozen of the most commonly used reports, which Vizioncore calls "faqts," such as which users have the most space and are consuming the most CPU time. It also provides some of the most common alerts, such as space deficits. The professional edition offers more of these faqts, and is adding new ones all the time.

Currently, the software supports VMware ESX, and Condy says that the paid product will be supporting other hypervisors in the near future, such as Xen and Microsoft's Hyper-V. While he would not specify which ones would be available in the free product, "you can imagine pretty easily that we'll put out freeware versions," he says. More than 1,000 people downloaded it in the first two days it was available, he adds.

vFoglight QuickView is available now. The standard edition costs $499 and the professional version costs $699. The standard version offers more detailed monitoring, as well as the ability to monitor more than 250 virtual machines. The professional version includes features such as chargeback, capacity planning, third-party integration, physical operating system monitoring, general purpose monitoring and service management.