Vizioncore Improves Backups Of VMware Virtual Servers

Vizioncore's esxRanger Professional now enables users to improve their ability to track the movements of virtual servers created by VMware's ESX Server application and better optimize their virtual IT infrastructure, said David Bieneman, CEO of Antioch, Ill.-based Vizioncore.

Founded in 2002 as a third-party Citrix application developer, Vizioncore released the first version of esxRanger Professional in 2004, said Bieneman. The application is designed to help customers take advantage of their VMware virtual server environment.

esxRanger Professional allows users to create backups of virtual servers, move those backups to other parts of the data center, and make those backups available for disaster recovery purposes, Bieneman said. Customers can back up their virtual server images using esxRanger while backing up their data using standard backup applications in order to restore both the server images and data in case of a disaster, he said.

New in esxRanger Professional is compatibility with VMware's VirtualCenter, a VMware tool that lets virtual servers be moved from one physical host to another. Bieneman said this compatibility allows his company's application to track the movement of those virtual servers to ensure they are backed up properly.

Vizioncore also added a new database for tracking the success and failure records of the virtual server backups, as well as to show which virtual servers were backed up by who and to where, said Bieneman. The database also includes information on the size of both the original and compressed backup images and on how long the compression and the backup took.

Also new is a rules optimization engine that lets IT administrators look at the tree structure of their VMware virtual server environment and increase the efficiency of the server backups. For instance, Bieneman said, an administrator can specify that 100 virtual machines should be backed up immediately, with 15 virtual machines per host at three virtual machines per SAN LUN (logical unit number).

"This allows them to tune the backup to get more speed and efficiency, so that they are not backed up all at the same time," he said. "With VMware, there is no control over how many backups are done at the same time."

While VMware includes VMsnap for backing up virtual machines, that application does not allow tracking of the virtual servers and provides no confirmation of success or failure, said Bieneman.

esxRanger Professional is available starting this week at $499 per CPU or per socket for dual-core servers.

About 90 percent of Vizioncore's business comes from the channel, according to Bieneman. "We run everything through the resellers," he said. "Most of us here come from computer distributors or from Citrix."