Egenera Inc., the data center virtualization company, today announced the immediate availability of Egenera® vBlade™ software. An extension to Egenera PAN Manager™ software, Egenera vBlade software enables an entirely new way to manage both physical servers and virtual machines by providing a single environment for configuring, allocating, repurposing and managing both types of resources. Egenera's first vBlade implementation utilizes XenEnterprise™, a comprehensive virtualization solution from XenSource, Inc., based on the open source Xen™ hypervisor. Egenera also plans to integrate other hypervisors into PAN Manager for future vBlade implementations.

vBlades are user-defined partitions of a physical blade, used to consolidate multiple virtual machines onto a single physical server. By adding this capability to PAN Manager, customers can easily allocate either a full blade or a partition of a blade based on the needs of the application. This approach eliminates the complexity of managing virtual machines and physical servers in different ways and eliminates the need to add another domain expert into the IT organization.

In addition, virtual machines running on the Egenera® BladeFrame® system have automatic access to a complete range of virtualization services, including N+1 automatic failover, N+1 disaster recovery, resource pools, BladeFarms™, suspend/resume, live migration, security and other capabilities. With full system redundancy and integrated failover, high availability and disaster recovery, the BladeFrame system provides the optimal platform for virtual machines running production applications.

"We continue to see management complexity increase in mixed physical and virtual environments, especially as customers seek to deploy large numbers of virtual machines. In an enterprise with both physical and virtual servers, the management tools must be much more sophisticated to manage both the physical and virtual worlds, and understand the dependencies between them," said Pete Manca, executive vice president of Engineering and CTO at Egenera. "We see this as the single biggest challenge in virtual environments and a great opportunity for Egenera and vBlade software."

Availability and Pricing

vBlade software is available immediately and is priced as a separate add-on to the Egenera BladeFrame system. More information is available by calling (1) 508.858.3600.