Carlsbad, California based ToutVirtual today announced the release of its virtualization management product called VirtualIQ Pro. The company had originally announced a free version of its policy-based, automated management solution back in July of 2006, calling it VirtualIQ 525. The product supported up to 5 CPUs or 25 virtual machines, and could manage virtualization platforms from VMware as well as open-sourc Carlsbad, California based ToutVirtual today announced the release of its virtualization management product called VirtualIQ Pro.The company had originally announced a free version of its policy-based, automated management solution back in July of 2006, calling it VirtualIQ 525. The product supported up to 5 CPUs or 25 virtual machines, and could manage virtualization platforms from VMware as well as open-source Xen. Since that time, the company has recently discontinued availability of the freeware product and instead replaced it with the pay version of VirtualIQ Pro. The new pay version offers more functionality and wider virtualization platform support.VirtualIQ Pro has expanded its feature set to include real-time monitoring, host and virtual machine performance management, capacity planning, and faster root-cause analysis. The product’s Web-based console allows IT administrators to automate virtual machines with policy configurations, determine resource usage of CPU and memory, create alarms and generate reports. And unlike management products from the virtualization platform vendors themselves, ToutVirtual prides itself on being vendor agnostic, supporting multiple heterogeneous virtualization platforms from VMware, Microsoft, XenSource and Novell.The product is sold as a standalone software package or bundled and sold as a software appliance. The software appliance can manage up to 10 CPUs or 50 virtual machines, while the software package is scalable to an unlimited number of CPUs and virtual machines.“We hear over and over again that what customers need now is the ability to manage virtual servers using policy-based and automated IT processes,” said Vipul Pabari, chief technology officer for ToutVirtual. “VirtualIQ Pro is a unified management console that enables broad deployment of virtualization technology in a snap. VirtualIQ Pro’s capacity planning, performance management and web- based reports enable IT administrators to proactively manage their cross-platform virtual server environment.” VirtualIQ Pro products provide IT managers the following technical benefits: Faster root-cause analysis in real time Ease of installation and deployment Visibility of physical hosts and virtual machine usage for quick capacity planning Host and virtual machine performance management Agentless operation for simple installation and support Policy-based real-time alarms, actions and virtual machine backup Real-time and historical reports for proactive management VirtualIQ Pro products are cost-effective and produce a better ROI via: Single, unified web console which allows management of multi-node heterogeneous virtual platforms Better IT resources balancing by means of business service priority settings Scalable product offering to match business growth Deployment capabilities at departmental, server room, or data center level with the same user interface Reduction in capital and operational expenditures via capacity planning, performance management, and root-cause analysis tools The list price for each software appliance is $599 for a one year subscription or $1499 for a three year subscription. The software solution is based on the number of CPUs and virtual machines. Software Development