Last month, vizioncore made a surprising announcement when they released their esxBasics bundle with the amazingly low price of "free". The package included free basic versions of vizioncore's flagship products, esxRanger and esxCharter which offered a valuable backup and monitoring solution for non-mission critical VMware ESX Server implementations.

This month, vizioncore introduced esxEssentials, a full management suite for companies operating a production level VMware ESX Server environment. The bundled suite provides complete versions of vizioncore's backup solution, monitoring tool, and host-level replication system. And by offering a bundled solution, vizioncore is able to more aggressively market all of their products, rather than just focusing on one solution.

David Bieneman, CEO of vizioncore, said "the decision to bundle the esxReplicator, esxCharter, and esxRanger Professional solutions together into the esxEssentials suite was driven by our desire to help the VMware community more efficiently and affordably manage ESX Servers." By creating a management suite of the company's offerings, a ready-to-implement, turnkey solution is being made available in a single and affordable package. With an introductory price of $899 per CPU, companies can now leverage their buying power with esxEssentials rather than purchasing each product separately which would total somewhere over $1,250 per CPU.

The following features are made available in the esxEssentials suite:

• esxReplicator - Providing complete, outside-the-guest replication functionality, esxReplicator facilitates both selective and complete replication of the entire virtual machine and its configuration, even when operating with dissimilar hardware. The esxReplicator's ability to copy configuration settings, OS patches/level changes, stored data, and more while reducing costs associated with licensing, management, and maintenance ensures total business continuity at an affordable price.

• esxCharter - The only real-time monitoring solution that provides key ESX Server host metrics, esxCharter allows administrators to monitor bottlenecks in the virtual infrastructure, achieve service levels for applications with GUI-based performance adjustments, and respond quickly to issues with alerting and real-time metrics.

• esxRanger Professional - The industry-leading dynamic backup solution for the VMware Server, esxRanger Professional provides full bare-metal image backups of virtual machines on individual ESX Servers. The tool fully integrates with VirtualCenter(R), reporting database repository and intelligent policy-based rules engine, and provides an intuitive, agent-less solution that all administrators will find easy to use and deploy, regardless of experience level.
  

More information about the package can be found on vizioncore's Web site, here.