Egenera, XenSource and vBlade Software

Egenera launched its vBlade software, a new way to manage both physical servers and virtual machines by providing a single environment for configuring, allocating, repurposing and managing both types of resources. Their first vBlade implementation utilizes XenEnterprise from XenSource, a commercial implementation of virtualized Windows and Linux on the Xen hypervisor.

Additionally, XenSource announced that it has entered into an OEM agreement with Egenera whereby Egenera will integrate XenEnterprise into Egenera PAN (Processor Area Network) Manager software as part of the new vBlade offering.

XenEnterprise offers the ability to easily move multiple virtual servers onto a single physical machine, and then migrate those virtual servers elsewhere whenever additional resources are needed – a solution that helps to greatly reduce the total number of servers needed by an organization, and thereby reduce IT costs.

“Egenera is a pioneer in using virtualization to simplify the datacenter and help enterprise IT become more efficient and cost effective,” said Simon Crosby, founder and CTO of XenSource. “With the integration of XenEnterprise with PAN Manager, customers will be able to take advantage of even greater levels of efficiency, performance and utilization, while maintaining the overall simplicity of management within their datacenters.”

Unlike legacy servers, Egenera servers have always been virtual assets that are deployed, managed and repurposed quickly and simply. Rather than tie a specific operating system and application to a physical server, Egenera’s PAN architecture creates pools of compute, storage and network resources that can be easily shared and automatically repurposed based on business priorities and service level agreements.

With the introduction of vBlade software, users can define pools of physical and virtual blades, and deploy Egenera’s virtual servers on either physical or virtual blades in the same exact manner across the entire PAN – including multiple BladeFrame systems – making the provisioning of servers to physical or virtual blades simple. This also provides easy failover, rapid scalability, load balancing and disaster recovery on a larger scale.

vBlade software will be priced as a separate add-on to the Egenera BladeFrame system. A preview release is now available to Egenera customers, and will become generally available in the first half of 2007.