Vizioncore announced numerous products at VMworld 2008

Vizioncore, perhaps best known for their virtualization backup solution vRanger Pro (formerly known as esxRanger), officially pulled the covers off a wide range of new product technologies during VMworld 2008. The company believes that its new and improved product line will take the company beyond virtualization backup and further into broader functionality such as management, monitoring, optimization, and automation.

So the company unveiled several new products at VMworld 2008 for the very first time, but there was one caveat: The new technology wasn’t yet generally available at show time, but it is expected to be ready sometime later this fall.

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In keeping with their backup expertise, Vizioncore announced the latest version of its industry-recognized backup and restore solution, vRanger Pro 4.0. The new product will include a faster engine to provide increased speed and scalability, support for incremental backups resulting in smaller storage requirements, an updated GUI management interface, and added support for Microsoft’s PowerShell scripting language to integrate the product with existing third-party enterprise backup suites.

They also announced a 4.0 version of vConverter, the company’s physical to virtual and image migration software. vConverter 4.0 helps automate and accelerate virtual machine conversions between Microsoft, Virtual Iron, VMware, and XenServer environments, allowing customers to migrate workloads between platforms as part of scheduled migration projects or for disaster recovery purposes. New features found in 4.0 include synchronized cutover (allowing for testing of the converted environment before going live), continuous protection with incremental replication technology, automated remote cold migration (helps with data consistency between source and target), task profiles (saves time and resources by storing and re-using pre-defined conversion settings), and a new Quick Convert feature (one click P2V migrations).

The company is also pushing forward into the performance and storage optimization of a virtual machine with its vOptimizer software. It offers storage reclamation technology so that customers can fully automate the process of shrinking and expanding VMDKs and Windows partitions to reduce enterprise storage costs. Virtualized storage can become one of the most expensive components of a virtual environment. Reclaiming a few wasted gigs of storage space in a virtual machine can add up quickly when you have hundreds of virtual machines exhibiting the same behavior. vOptimizer allows administrators to automate this level of ongoing housekeeping.

And finally, the company announced its comprehensive workflow, policy, and lifecycle management suite being made available for multiple platforms. The suite is a combination of three separate programs: vWorkflow, a workflow management tool used to automate certain manual processes; vControl, a Web-based management tool used to control the virtual datacenter; and vLifecycle, a tool created to control policy-based lifecycle management of a virtual machine from beginning to end.

Chris Akerberg, president and COO of Vizioncore, summed up the event by saying:

The overwhelming theme of the show was how virtualization is now broadly recognized as the accepted way of architecting the datacenter, while there was a strong focus on how virtualization makes disaster recovery simple for customers. Our conversations with end users at the event reinforced that our move to a broader and more cohesive management platform for heterogeneous virtual environments is definitely the right direction and validates the strategic direction we are heading in. Organizations deploying virtualization want the management tools to handle any workload, independent of the OS, application, infrastructure or virtualization platform they are using.