Hyperic

Earlier this year, VMware announced a new product called vFabric Application Director. Application Director is a new product that runs atop VMware vCenter Director that helps application architects visually plan, build and deploy applications to cloud infrastructure. Today, Eitan Gayor, a VMware engineer, published a new video that shows a very simplified version of how he can build a plan and deploy a single server, including the VMware vFabric Application Performance Manager (APM) agent. APM is a new offering that combines Hyperic, Spring Insight and a new product called AppInsight together to provide a single pane of glass for application administrators that automatically keeps pace with application changes, makes it easy to interpret application-level performance and provides direct access to fix problems.

Gayor further describes Application Director and its key concepts as:

The key purpose for Application Director is to automate the provisioning of infrastructure and applications so it happens faster, with fewer errors, and with less headache. If you’ve ever used a standard catalog of parts, you’ll get the idea immediately because Application Director stores information in a visual representation called a blueprint.  What’s in a blueprint? Basically, a blueprint includes everything you would use to build, configure, and deploy a server or group of servers to build out your application.  Blueprints define all the components like the operating system, virtual machine templates, web server, application server, database server, monitoring software, packaged software, EAR, SQL, or WAR, etc.  All these components are available to drag and drop onto your blueprint’s canvas from a standard catalog. Once the core building blocks are in place on your blueprint, you can further tailor your application build plan by including dependencies, policies, and configurations.

The SlideRocket demo illustrates three important parts of building an application using Application Director:

1. Building the blueprint is intuitive and quick using drag and drop capabilities.
2. Incorporating management capabilities, such as the vFabric Application Performance Manager (APM) agent takes just seconds using the pre-populated catalog service.
3. Deploying the blueprint to be provisioned on your target server is as fast as just one click.

To deploy another server,  just re-use the blueprint, add the new server, add any dependencies, and redeploy the improved application infrastructure.

VMware vFabric Application Performance Manager provides vFabric Hyperic customers with real-time visibility on their applications performance from a users point-of-view to help better manage SLAs in the cloud. Driven by VMware vFabric AppInsight, and fused with the metric data and control of vFabric Hyperic, you now have a next-generation application operations dashboard that automatically models transactions across all application tiers, providing a critical real-time perspective on the true performance of dynamically scaling applications.

Upgrade before June 30, 2012 to vFabric Application Performance Manager for just $99. See offer for more details.

We are proud to announce that the former Hyperic Forums have been successfully migrated to a new Hyperic VMware Community. As stated in a blog late last year, this is an important milestone for Hyperic users worldwide. This marks the final step in the transition of the customer experience into the larger family of products and support offered by VMware that help to dramatically simplify IT and reduce operational expenses.

Benefits are substantial for Hyperic users. As mentioned in a post earlier this year, they include:

• Single place to get help and collaborate on issues involving systems management, software development and virtualization.
• With over 1.2 million community members, including VMware product, support and field teams, this is the largest technology community leading the market on bringing the enterprise to the cloud.
• The largest resource knowledge base for VMware products, users can find sample code, SDKs, and APIs to help with all their development needs.

The new Hyperic VMware Community retains all of the former forum category organization, as well as the complete history of all announcements, messages and threads. Each thread from the former Forums will now be redirected to the new VMware Communities to aid in search or if users have bookmarked popular topics.

User history has been attached based on email address. If a user’s email address did not exist in the VMware Community, a new account was created for them and the user was notified to register now. All reward points have been transferred and users now gain credit under the VMware Communities rewards program.

Got questions? For questions on the migration, please check out the Hyperic VMware Communities Migration FAQ or, for general questions on how the VMware Communities work, see the VMware Communities FAQ.

Haven’t used the VMware Communities yet? All Hyperic users, including open source and enterprise users, are welcome to join. To join, go to the VMware Communities login and click Register.

UPDATE: Migration will now start on January 31st, at 6 pm PST.

On February 1st, we will migrate the independent Hyperic Forums over to the overall VMware Communities.  All forums, messages, threads, announcements and reward points will be migrated over to a new Hyperic VMware Community. User history will be attached based on email address. If no user is found in the VMware Community, a new user will be created and an email will be sent to the user inviting them to join.

Once complete, this will offer Hyperic users a multitude of benefits including:

• Single place to get help and collaborate on issues involving systems management, software development and virtualization.
• With over 1.2 million community members, including VMware product, support and field teams, this is the largest technology community leading the market on bringing the enterprise to the cloud.
• The largest resource knowledge base for VMware products, users can find sample code, SDKs, and APIs to help with all their development needs.

The Hyperic Forums will be in read-only mode from February 1, 2012 for a few days, after which all content and discussions will be redirected and available on the VMware Communities. For more information on this migration, please see the Hyperic VMware Communities Migration FAQ.

Haven’t used the VMware Communities yet? All Hyperic users, including open source and enterprise users, are welcome to join. To join, go to the VMware Communities login and click Register.

• Login to Hyperic Forums
• Login to VMware Communities

[SS1]Date needs to be validated closer to the release.