Xangati

VDI Management—the Transformation

Alan Robin, CEO, Xangati

trans·form·a·tion — to change markedly the nature, condition or form of

Taking something and moving it beyond its existing form—the act of transformation—has always defined progress. The companies—and people—who have successfully brought significant innovations into our world have been able to go past traditional boundaries and examine things in a new light.

One transformation also begets others.

The industry has embraced the concepts behind the transformational architectures being developed in the data center—cloud computing, server virtualization and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). But these architectural changes have impacted the methodologies of everything surrounding the data center—necessitating further transformation. Staying mired in the status quo—sticking to an outdated model—does not work when you’re addressing a new transformational architecture.

Xangati has today unveiled a new solution that enables IT to manage VDI to an operational scale for the very first time—transforming management of the infrastructure—and giving VDI teams the confidence and ability to successfully implement large-scale deployments.

As a company, Xangati is both engineering- and solution-driven. This balance allows us to integrate cutting edge technology—such as our real-time memory-based analytics architecture—into highly relevant products that have been designed to meet a clear industry need.

Our new product—the Xangati VDI Dashboard—fills such a need by addressing all of the moving parts in the VDI and giving real-time insights into how the entire infrastructure impacts the VDI—all in a single pane of glass. Think about it. Without this capability, VDI teams have no way to see anything that might be causing desktop performance problems that isn’t linked to their VDI software. This capability alone shatters one of the biggest obstacles befalling many stalled and cancelled VDI projects.

But Xangati has gone even further to incorporate a breakthrough feature—a performance health engine—that enables real-time alerts about the precise location and urgency of performance issues affecting the entire VI. Using Xangati’s memory-driven architecture, the performance health engine continuously monitors the VDI to an unprecedented scale across all objects—including desktops and clients—that are impacting end-users.

Transformational? No doubt.

But the VDI puzzle requires additional consideration. We need to look at what’s altering the desktop to really understand why this type of a solution is absolutely essential. What other transformations are spurring it on?

The end user juggernaut—combined with the growth of end user devices such as smartphones and Internet tablets—is propelling VDI. Users are demanding the freedom and ability to fully access and utilize all of their desktop applications through whatever device they want.

And the pressure is on IT to guarantee a positive end user experience.

As Gartner explains in a presentation for the December 2010 Gartner Data Center Conference titled Managing the End-User Application and Desktop Experience, “The more services that are ‘hosted’ and centrally managed by IT, the greater their responsibility to manage the availability and performance of those services becomes. When IT gives a user a laptop with applications residing on it, it traditionally has been the user’s ‘job’ not to break it. Now IT has to worry about availability and performance for an increasing number of applications and desktops.”

Supporting both VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop, the Xangati VDI Dashboard provides IT with the ultimate VDI portal to monitor all components in and outside of the VI, optimize performance and guarantee a positive end-user experience. With 50 million VDI clients projected by 2013, businesses must consider management up front at the start of any implementation, and management solutions must bring value to the table from day one.

We’re so confident that our Xangati VDI Dashboard achieves this that we’re offering a free two-week trial—something we’ve never done before with one of our full-fledged products. Xangati invites you to go to http://xangati.com/VDI_dashboard and get started today.

We expect that you’ll find the experience—dare I say—transformational.

Virtualization Rising…with Xangati for ESX!

Jagan Jagannathan, Founder and CTO, Xangati

I can feel virtualization rising. With more than three thousand downloads since its first release just six months ago—and counting—Xangati’s free VMware management tool—Xangati for ESX—is adding to the virtualization upswing, moving it forward on its rising path.

How high will it go? As far as I can see, the momentum—as significant as it already is—will only build and increase further over the next few years. Businesses are continuing to invest in virtualization technologies and realize that they must be able to adequately manage their new environments in order to guarantee application performance and availability—and reap its many benefits.

Xangati for ESX is a free tool that provides comprehensive insights and real-time performance analysis—enabling businesses to do just that. It has been designed to give VI administrators a solution that can be easily downloaded and used immediately for insights into the performance of a specific ESX host.

But we are constantly looking for ways to improve our solutions, and when we add product functionality or enhancements, we do it based on feedback from you. Today I’m happy to let you know that Xangati has listened once again and has made the installation process of Xangati for ESX even easier for VI administrators to download and use.

That’s right—we’ve significantly enhanced our free VMware tool based on your feedback—and it’s still absolutely free!

We’ve made Xangati for ESX even faster and more intuitive for deployment—so that you can get the system up and running as quickly as possible. We’ve accomplished this through features that include a new and simplified GUI-based appliance set up—for getting the appliance addressed and powered-up and on the network—launched directly from the vCenter console tab.

In addition, Xangati has standardized on one OVF for Xangati for ESX that works with both DHCP and non-DHCP environments. This enables customers to download a single version of the appliance and be able to apply it “at will” uniformly to individual hosts regardless of the IP address management model of a specific data center segment. And—most significantly—the install wizard to initially launch the UI has been adapted to reduce the complexity of how Xangati gathers rich information from the vSwitch. As a result of the above, we have halved the number of screens that a user has to go through to get an operational UI.

So, if you’ve got 20 minutes, you’ve got immediate visibility—with continuous and real-time insights into your VMs and the ESX. And, of course—just like before—you have an easy-to-use navigational drill-down user interface and Xangati’s unique DVR-recordings, which allow you to see what was happening at the exact time a performance problem occurred.

Listening is the best way for us to learn and understand precisely what you need and want to manage these new virtualized infrastructures. Because of that, we invest a lot of time engaging with our partners and end users to make sure that we are on-target with your needs.

Xangati’s trip to the VMware PEX gave us another one of those opportunities, as well as our participation as a sponsor in Tech Field Day. At Tech Field Day I enjoyed interfacing directly with some of the leading virtualization bloggers in the industry. This gave me a chance to share our technical viewpoint and listen to theirs as well.

February has provided us with a lot of industry contact that we’re putting to good use. You can start benefitting right now with our enhanced free Xangati for ESX management solution and I guarantee that you will benefit even further with additional product developments coming down the pipeline in March. 

Our goal is really as simple and straightforward as our streamlined installation process. We will continue to innovate and add products and capabilities to our virtualization management suite in order to give you the power and confidence to successfully deploy these emerging technologies.