Xangati tackles virtual system blind spots

Industry analysis by Beth Schultz, plus the latest news headlines.

Virtualization technologies offer IT departments the opportunity to maximize resources and consolidate hardware, but virtual systems often hide much of the data network managers need to track performance and troubleshoot problems. Network management start-up Xangati this week released a suite of virtual appliances designed to apply Xangati’s traffic monitoring expertise to virtual systems communications, making it possible to better manage application performance in the virtual realm.

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One of the challenges that virtualization poses to traditional management approaches is visibility. Communications between hypervisors is not easily tracked in the same way as network traffic can be monitored, captured and reviewed for troubleshooting purposes. Xangati executives say its new products, Xangati for ESX and the Xangati Management Dashboard, will help IT managers capture virtual machine communications as well as traffic between virtual and physical machines. The vendor can capture such data and provide it to be played back for troubleshooting purposes, according to David Messina, vice president of marketing for Xangati.

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Virtualization technologies offer IT departments the opportunity to maximize resources and consolidate hardware, but virtual systems often hide much of the data network managers need to track performance and troubleshoot problems. Network management start-up Xangati this week released a suite of virtual appliances designed to apply Xangati’s traffic monitoring expertise to virtual systems communications, making it possible to better manage application performance in the virtual realm.

Why IT pros like their favorite gear
Watch a slideshow of this product

One of the challenges that virtualization poses to traditional management approaches is visibility. Communications between hypervisors is not easily tracked in the same way as network traffic can be monitored, captured and reviewed for troubleshooting purposes. Xangati executives say its new products, Xangati for ESX and the Xangati Management Dashboard, will help IT managers capture virtual machine communications as well as traffic between virtual and physical machines. The vendor can capture such data and provide it to be played back for troubleshooting purposes, according to David Messina, vice president of marketing for Xangati.

“What we are doing in the virtual world is making up for the blind spots that have started to emerge significantly. We used to be focused on tracking physical to physical communications. Now we are approaching that from the vantage point of virtualization,” Messina says. “We are solving the problem of visibility into the virtual realm, fixing the problem of blind spots.”

Xangati’s rapid problem identification (RPI) technology pinpoints the source of problems across an enterprise by using flow information, such as Cisco's NetFlow, sFlow or cFlow. The technology discovers all IP endpoints and applications running on them and profiles the endpoint, whether it be a desktop, server, storage device, VoIP phone or PDA. The RPI technology baselines normal behavior and alerts staff when anomalous events occur. With the introduction of its new products, Xangati worked to integrate its technology with VMware’s vCenter to enable IT managers to get the full picture of what is happening in their virtual environment.

“vCenter would show a strong illumination of what virtual machines and virtual resources are doing, such as health status, but it might not catch information on communications within the blind spots of hypervisor traffic,” Messina explains.

Xangati’s suite of virtual appliances is available now. Pricing for Xangati for ESX starts at $299, or the virtual appliance can be downloaded for a free 14-day trial here. The Xangati Management Dashboard Standard is priced at $4,999, and the Enterprise edition for $9,999. The company is also offering a Starter Kit at a discounted rate of $9,999, which includes Xangati for ESX for up to 20 hosts and the Xangati Management Dashboard Enterprise edition.

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Schultz is a longtime IT journalist. You can email her or find her here.