I was one of the judges for the best new products category at VMworld 2008 and one of the top 3 products that I chose was Vizioncore’s vOptimizer Pro. I felt that it could give Virtualization Admin’s real ammo to show their manager / CIO that they absolutely saved the company money by reducing the size of SAN LUNs allocated to virtual machines.

Today, Vizioncore released vOptimizer Pro (see this press release ). According to Vizioncore, here is what vOptimizer Pro can offer us, as Virtualization Admins:

• Reduce enterprise storage costs – Virtual machines can be provisioned with the click of a button. An average resize typically reduces a virtual machine’s size by 50% – therefore a 50 GB virtual machine will be resized to 25 GB, saving 25GB. At a nominal price of $5/GB this would equate to savings of $125 per virtual machine.
• Right-size shared storage resources – By reclaiming storage capacity, vOptimizer Pro allows IT departments to re-use those resources for other valuable initiatives, such as disaster recovery and test & development.
• Improve virtual machine portability and accelerate disaster recovery – Virtual machines can be copied, stored and moved around the network like a standard file. By creating more streamlined virtual machines, vOptimizer Pro ensures a higher level of workload portability within the virtual infrastructure.
• Lower IT maintenance overheads – IT admins are often faced with the task of reducing or increasing the volume and VMDK size of a running VM manually – typically an extremely difficult and time consuming task. vOptimizer Pro automates this cumbersome procedure completely.

You can download a free trial of vOptimizer Pro at Vizioncore’s website .

This video was recorded and is hosted by Eric Sloof. You can find the original source of this video and many other VMware-related videos on his Vimeo page at – http://vimeo.com/esloof

If you haven’t seen it, I encourage you to take a look at Deploying VMware Infrastructure. You can buy it online at one of my favorite online bookstores – DigitalGuru (there are other choices besides that other “big online bookstore”).

From the show, TechTarget’s SearchServerVirtualization.com has put together a ton of videos including videos from myself and a number of the other expert judges. To view these videos, just click on the video graphic below (yes, that is me):

As you can see in the diagram above, VMware’s new product line is broken down as:

• Application vServices guarantee the appropriate levels of availability, security and scalability to all applications independent of hardware and location.
• Infrastructure vServices subtract, aggregate and allocate on-premise servers, storage and network for maximum infrastructure efficiency.
• Cloud vServices federate the on-premise infrastructure with third party cloud infrastructure.
• Management vServices allow you to proactively manage the virtual datacenter OS and the applications running on it.

A huge piece of this is the new Virtual Data Center OS, or VDC-OS, expected to be released in 2009. The real power of the VDC-OS concept is that it will allow IT Managers to easily and quickly allow applications and end user devices to “tap into the power of the virtual infrastructure”. They call this new virtual resource the “vCloud”.

You can watch a testimonial video about how companies like eBay have already been using the beta version of VMware’s new products (and have found them favorable) and you can read more about the new VDC-OS at VMware’s VDC-OS page.

Additionally, other articles about the new VDC-OS have been posted at:

• Scott Lowe – VDC-OS
• ComputerWorld – VDC-OS
• PCWorld – VDC-OS
• Gabe’s Virtual World – VDC-OS

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Stay tuned to VMwareVideos.com for complete VMworld 2008 Coverage including video content that you won’t find elsewhere! Also, get immediate VMworld Twitter updates at my Twitter Feed.