It looks like VMware is getting more interested in what's happening inside the virtual machine after all.  I've had a few discussions with VMware over the years, and they made it sound as if they were somewhat akin to a shipping company, moving around the packages but not worried about what was actually inside of those packages.  The packages, obviously, being virtual machines and the applications being what's inside those virtual machines.  Looks like they could be on the road of changing their minds with the acquisition of B-hive Networks.  VMware will be able to proactively monitor the performance of the guest operating system and the applications.

VMware, Inc. (NYSE:VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire B-hive Networks, Inc., a privately-held application performance management software company with headquarters in San Mateo, California and principal R&D facilities in Herzliya, Israel. With this acquisition, VMware will leverage the B-hive team and technology to offer proactive performance management and service level reporting for applications running within VMware virtual machines - on both servers and desktops. In addition, B-hive’s R&D facility and team will form the core of VMware’s new development center in Israel. The terms of the acquisition, which is expected to be completed during the third quarter of 2008, subject to customary closing conditions, were not disclosed.

“As customers increasingly standardize on the VMware platform to run their business-critical applications, it is critical for virtual infrastructure administrators to ensure the performance of applications from an end-user’s perspective,” said Stephen Herrod, Ph.D., chief technology officer, VMware. “B-hive’s agentless, virtual appliance-based approach goes beyond traditional monitoring approaches to proactively manage application performance to specified levels. These capabilities, combined with VMware’s proven virtualization platform, can allow our customers to consistently deliver on their application service level objectives. For example, if B-hive identifies degradation in application response time, it can remediate the problem by automatically instructing VMware Infrastructure to adjust the resources allocated to the application or provision an additional virtual machine with an additional instance of the application. In conjunction with VMware’s automated IT service delivery and business continuity capabilities, B-hive’s service level management capabilities further deliver on the vision of an automated, always-on, virtual datacenter.”

Founded in 2005, B-hive has a unique solution that gives infrastructure groups visibility into application performance in virtual environments such as end-user transaction response time, virtual machine utilization and cross-virtual machine dependencies. Unlike OS-based performance monitoring products, the B-hive solution is designed to measure performance across multi-tier or service-oriented architecture applications that are distributed across clusters of ESX hypervisors and virtual machines. A “Best of VMworld” finalist at VMworld 2007, B-hive’s flagship product, B-hive Conductor, not only monitors end-user performance and issues service level reports, but can also proactively resolve application performance problems by automatically triggering actions such as dynamically allocating more resources, migrating the application to a different server, provisioning additional VMs, changing transaction routing, or system re-boots.

B-hive Conductor is agent-less, packaged as a virtual appliance and provides open, standards-based interfaces. By integrating with B-hive, enterprise application management products can provide a holistic view of service levels across physical and virtual environments. VMware’s management partners will now have enhanced ability to manage business services across the enterprise by leveraging service level metrics for applications in a VMware virtualized environment. For more information about B-hive, please visit http://www.b-hivenetworks.com/.

"VMware has been a trailblazer in the industry and has given organizations a much better way to plan and execute their IT operations through virtualization, and we are excited to join this winning team," said Yoav Dembak, CEO and co-founder of B-hive. "As customers move from the physical to virtual, our combined solutions will provide even greater visibility into the performance of applications and make it possible to resolve a problem before it occurs. Our shared goal is to improve the end user experience and maximize the value of investments in VMware virtualization.”

“With this acquisition, VMware gains a unique solution that solves real-world problems, and adds a highly talented engineering team who shares our passion for innovation,” added Herrod. “We expect the B-hive R&D team to be an integral part of our new development center in Israel.”

From the B-hive Web site, here are some of the product's features:

B-hive Conductor for Virtual Application Infrastructure features:

• Migration Performance Assurance
  Measure baseline service levels before and after virtualization implementation to enable accurate sizing of the virtual environment to achieve comparable or improved performance.

   

• Service Level Visibility and Control
  Understand how virtual servers are utilized by applications. Maintain the end-user experience by identifying and overcoming performance bottlenecks and outages.

   

• High Availability and Disaster Recovery Enablement
  Automate the execution of VMware's built-in capabilities (i.e. image rollback, new server provisioning, etc.) when problems occur - in real-time - to resolve performance and availability problems as they occur.

   

• Dynamic Resource Allocation
  Provision and de-allocate new resources as needed - automatically - so that virtualized resources are sized accurately, based on application performance and usage patterns.