Dell Updates Foglight Virtualization Management Software

Virtualization management tool Foglight for Virtualization (FVE) 8 is now in preview. The two major additions include new features to Capacity Director and the Change Analyzer, a feature that will allow virtual administrators to track, and optionally roll back, change events.

IT administrators use FVE for insight and control to change tracking across the virtual environment. It gives visibility across virtual and physical resources and helps to identify and fix problems and plan for growth.

Advanced optimization and capacity management tools are key to meeting performance SLAs and help leverage capital and operational cost efficiencies.

New additions to FVE 8 enhance the ability to better control change, logically prepare for growth and optimize the placement of future workloads. FVE 8 also includes an updated dashboard, providing a single pane of glass view showing a unified environment across virtual storage, network technologies and cloud deployments.

The added Change Analyzer  allows virtual administrators to track, and optionally roll back, change events across several areas, from data center to cluster to VM and everywhere in between. It provides cross-hypervisor change tracking capabilities, allowing organizations to track, report and alert on any event that can impact overall virtual infrastructure performance. Impact Analysis reports can be performed to see impact before changes are made, as well as how changes impact performance.

Capacity Director is enhanced in FVE 8 to provide easier server and infrastructure migration planning. It helps plan for infrastructure upgrades and migrations with little to no downtime. The following features were added:

“Initially, virtualization was about getting better ROI and total cost of ownership on hardware, but the drivers of virtualization growth are changing,” said John Maxwell, vice president, virtualization monitoring, Dell Software. “Cost efficiency is still important, but tools in the virtualization space – management, provisioning and monitoring – have been innovative and have enabled the next logical phase, which is reducing operating expenses by allowing customers to automate many tasks."

Version 8 follows FVE 7.2, released last month. FVE 7.2 delivered vSwitch support. It added virtual Ethernet network management support, delivering packet level analysis with netflow technology.

Foglight supports leading hypervisors, a wide range of storage arrays, virtual network technologies, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and many cloud platforms.