Egenera bundles free VM management software for blades and rack servers

Egenera announced that it is now offering its PAN vmBuilder software at no additional charge with each PAN Builder software license purchased for Dell PowerEdge blades and rack servers.  And for the Egenera BladeFrame product line, PAN vmBuilder software is now bundled into PAN Manager at no additional cost as well.

“Through PAN vmBuilder, pools of storage, network, and computing resources can be shared by virtual as well as physical machines,” said Christine Crandell, EVP at Egenera.  “vmBuilder’s benefit is [that] it enables datacenter administrators to manage and perform live migration of virtual machines without needing to learn or manage an underlying hypervisor.  As part of the free offer, Egenera is bundling PAN vmBuilder with license purchases of PAN Builder software at no additional charge.”

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Crandell added that Egenera plans on further enhancing vmBuilder, and that the next release scheduled later this year will add support for Citrix XenServer 5.

The PAN vmBuilder product includes the following functionality:

• Automatically installing the XenServer hypervisor on a physical server when required

• Concealing XenServer commands beneath the PAN Manager interface
• Allowing virtual and physical servers to share the same storage, network, and peripheral resource pools
• Combining physical and virtual servers under the same administrative domain
• Performing live migration of virtual machines
• Extending the capabilities of PAN Server Portability software by Egenera by enabling failover of a single virtual machine or all of the virtual machines running on a physical server

Crandell told InfoWorld that current users of vmBuilder will receive upgrades and updates as part of their PAN Builder software support agreements and that current Egenera PAN Builder customers with active maintenance agreements are also entitled to free PAN vmBuilder licenses.  All a user needs to do is contact Egenera or their account representative to gain access to the software module.

PAN vmBuilder is currently available on Dell’s PowerServer rack and blades and Egenera’s BladeFrame systems.