CiRBA Inc., a leader in Data Center Intelligence, today announced the release of Version 4.4 of its leading consolidation and virtualization analysis software solution. New functionality included in Version 4.4 ensures that organizations achieve optimal initial placements for virtual machines, and improves the ability to manage and govern environments virtualized using VMware.

CiRBA’s unique multi-dimensional analysis capabilities enable organizations to simultaneously analyze critical business and technical constraints and detailed workload data to map virtualization opportunities. With Version 4.4, CiRBA enables organizations to factor into their analysis the unique characteristics of VMware’s virtualization technologies, such as VMware-associated CPU overhead, to further enhance the accuracy of virtualization planning.

Once organizations have used CiRBA to determine optimal initial placements and cluster design, CiRBA also helps them keep environments optimized over the long term by integrating with VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). Through this integration, it is seamless to create and synchronize rules that maintain optimal placement of virtual machines within virtualized environments.

“The combined power of VMware’s VMotion and Distributed Resource Scheduler will undoubtedly have a significant impact on management processes within data centers,” said Andrew Hillier, co-founder and CTO of CiRBA. “However, leveraging the benefits of these tools without sound boundaries runs the risk of violating key constraints.  CiRBA’s integration with VMware’s DRS makes it easy to create sophisticated DRS rules and manage them over time.”

Highlights of CiRBA Version 4.4 include:

·                VMware DRS Integration – VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) determines motion paths for virtual machines based on workload balancing criteria, without consideration for the technical and business constraints used to determine virtual machine placement. While DRS supports affinity and anti-affinity rules to identify where systems should or shouldn’t reside, these rules must be developed and entered manually. CiRBA 4.4 enables organizations to analyze environments, factor in technical and business constraints, and automatically populate and synchronize VMware DRS rules. 

·                Virtualization Overhead Modeling – The ability to accurately model workloads is critical to virtualization planning. Virtual machines create CPU overhead, and until now VMware customers had to rely on percentage-based estimates of those overhead levels.  With Version 4.4, CiRBA enables organizations to accurately model VMware workloads including virtualization overhead by using an algorithm to automatically calculate CPU overhead by converting disk and network IO into projected CPU load.

·                VMware VMotion Compatibility Analysis – VMotion is a powerful capability that enables organizations to migrate virtual images between compatible servers without experiencing downtime. CiRBA has developed new rules that enable organizations to map where VMotion will and won’t work amongst servers they already own or intend to purchase.

Pricing and Availability
CiRBA 4.4 will be available September 30, 2007. The solution is licensed on a monthly basis with pricing based on the number of server operating systems analyzed and term of commitment. For more information, visit www.cirba.com.