Dell Software announced a preview of the newest edition to its virtualization management product offering, Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition 8.0 – to be showcased this month at VMworld 2014.

With a single-pane-of-glass view, Dell Foglight for Virtualization enables IT to control change, visualize end-to-end infrastructure, as well as analyze and optimize the performance and capacity of the heterogeneous virtual environments – from the virtual machine (VM), through the virtual Ethernet network (including packet level analysis), to the physical disk extent in the storage array.

The solution addresses the operational challenges of IT teams, who need deep visibility across virtual and physical resources to identify and fix performance problems in virtual environments across all hypervisors, and plan for rapidly growing organizational needs.

Virtualization is now a ubiquitous technology and has been adopted by mainstream organizations, and this high adoption rate has increasingly diverse infrastructure deployments. The average number of VMs per virtualized server continues to rise, while the emergence of virtual storage, network technologies and cloud deployments are creating more complex data center environments. Until now, IT leadership and virtual administrators have lacked a unified solution that delivers an accurate, single-pane-of-glass view across the entire virtual infrastructure. Foglight for Virtualization is designed for today’s modern data center and with the release of 8.0, CIOs, IT managers, directors, and virtual administrators can better control change, logically prepare for growth and optimize the placement of future workloads.

Dell Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition 8.0 supports best-of-breed industry solutions, including any leading hypervisors, a wide range of storage arrays, virtual network technologies, VDI, and cloud platforms. It provides the advan ced optimization and capacity management tools that are key to meeting performance SLAs, and sets the required foundation for leveraging the capital and operational cost efficiency.

Hot on the heels of the new vSwitch support delivered in v7.2, Foglight for Virtualization 8.0 will deliver deeper analytics and feature the following:

- Analyze system variations with Change Analyzer feature that provides cross-hypervisor change tracking capabilities that allow organizations to track, report and alert on any event that can impact overall virtual infrastructure performance. Businesses can perform ‘impact analysis’ reports to see the impact of a change before it is made, as well as see the impact changes could have on performance with the ability to map changes in CPU, Memory, Disk and Network performance.

- Retain information about each historical changed event to see the impact of a change before implemented as well as the ability to view the source of change event and the impact on the environment, and even rollback the change if needed.

- Server and infrastructure migration planning made easy with new Capacity Director feature that spans modeling and forecasting of physical to virtual (P2V), virtual to virtual (V2), and even physical to physical server resource migrations, allowing administrators to seamlessly plan for infrastructure upgrades, with the flexibility to model the migration from one hypervisor vendor or private cloud infrastructure with little to no downtime

- New dashboard single-pane-of-glass view that allows IT admins the ability to view the important information about the entire virtual infrastructure, address the most important performance and resource issues, and ability to see virtual objects with problems up-front.

- Enhanced end-to-end visualization, intelligent profile engines, and comprehensive optimization functionality to reduce the blind spots and enable IT to create advanced models of future workloads and hardware requirements, as well as see movement between virtual clusters, physical servers and hypervisor platforms. This functionality reduces OPEX and CAPEX waste created by VM sprawl, inefficient VM deployment practices, and an inability to forecast the growth of application workloads.

Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition 8.0 preview follows just released version 7.2. Released this month, Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition 7.2 includes vSwitch support for virtual Ethernet network management, including deep analytics of virtual network traffic leveraging industry standard netflow technology. Foglight v7.2 delivers application-to-virtual infrastructure monitoring, management, and packet analysis, eliminating the “missing link” of Ethernet networking abstracted from the physical hardware. Version 7.2 also provides:

- Virtual Appliance and vApp, which will radically streamline and simplify installation and deployment of virtual infrastructure management technology. Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition can now be deployed in minutes, rather than hours, achieving rapid ROI

- Enhanced Performance and Scalability, which allows for greater data analytics, improved administrator efficiency, and the ability to visualize the entire virtual infrastructure on one platform

The Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition 8.0 will be demonstrated in booth number #1417 at VMworld 2014, Aug. 25-28, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Additionally, John Maxwell, vice president of product management, Dell Software, will discuss important industry trends, share highlights of the upcoming Foglight for Virtualization 8.0 release and discuss Dell Software’s customer centric approach to product design. The breakout session #3022 will take place at 3:30 pm on Monday, August 25.

Foglight for Virtualization 8.0 will be available in Q3 2014.