News

SpringSource Releases Hyperic Update

• By John K. Waters
• August 24, 2010

VMware's SpringSource group has released a major upgrade of its Hyperic custom-app management and monitoring technology for virtualized Java applications. The key enhancement in Hyperic 4.4 is deep integration with VMware's vCenter Server virtualization management system. The new version maintains a continually updated inventory of VMware vSphere ESXi and ESX hosts, explained Al Sargent, senior product marketing manager in the SpringSource group.

"It's engineered to provide more visibility into all your vSphere hosts and allow you to trouble shoot issues across your virtualized app infrastructure," Sargent said. "It basically lets app operations teams work more efficiently on virtualized app infrastructure."

This integration with vCenter is designed to provide a clear view of a virtual environment without having Hyperic and vCenter open at the same time, which allows admins to more rapidly find and correct application performance problems. That clear view spans VMware vSphere ESX and ESXi hosts, Sargent said, and spans both physical and virtual environments.

Hyperic has become a "key element" of SpringSource’s software suite, the company says. SpringSource, the chief commercial sponsor of the open-source, Java-based Spring Framework project, acquired Hyperic last August, shortly before SpringSource was, itself, acquired by VMware.

By integrating Hyperic with vCenter Server, the company has sought to improve the effectiveness of IT operations in virtual data centers, Sargent said.

"Of course, virtualization is a key trend within data centers," he said, "and customers need a way to manage the constant change that's happening there. You have new VMs being created, VMs being moved around through Vmotion technology, VMs being cloned and scaled up in response to user demand, especially when you have customer-facing web apps. You need a monitoring tool to keep up with all of those changes."

"Without virtualization there is no cloud computing," said Rachel Chalmers, research director for infrastructure in The 451 Group in a statement. "With virtualization, datacenters become increasingly dynamic. IT operations teams making this fundamental shift need management tools that understand the whole software stack, from VM through OS to application payload to make sure applications remain up and performing -- tools like Hyperic."

According to the company, the vCenter Server integration lets Hyperic 4.4 provide "rapid diagnosis of virtualized app performance problems, automatic maintenance of app infrastructure inventory and virtualization-aware alerting."

Spring is the open-source platform for building and running enterprise Java applications. It's a layered Java/J2EE framework based on code published in the book Expert One-on-One Java EE Design and Development (Wrox Press, October 2002), by Rod Johnson, CEO and co-founder of SpringSource. He also wrote the first version of the framework and now heads the VMware SpringSource group.

Hyperic 4.4 is available now.