Quest Software announced the release of Foglight version 5.2, which supports VMware ESX Server. In a growing and crowded virtualization management market, Foglight has the ability to monitor the impact virtualization changes can have on databases, applications and end users, while simultaneously correlating the usage of resources on both physical servers and virtual machines.

“Building on our recent acquisitions in the virtualization management market, the advancements in Foglight further establish Quest as an industry leader in this space,” said Vinny Smith, chairman and CEO, Quest. “Foglight is built to give customers confidence, as they increasingly virtualize their environments, by managing the application infrastructure that depends on and is impacted by virtualization.”

Industry experts continue to state that the server and desktop virtualization market will grow during the next several years. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2010, the server virtualization market will double in size. While virtualization technology offers multiple benefits, many organizations lack the necessary tools to move to and manage a virtual infrastructure without incurring performance issues.

The inability to manage mission-critical applications within a virtualized environment can result in service disruptions and costly downtime. To help address this problem, Foglight monitors the performance of services running on VMware by truly understanding and managing the virtual infrastructure, including physical servers, data centers, resource pools, and virtual machines.

“We have made strategic investments in virtualization and the results are great, in terms of both cost savings and resource utilization,” said Kyle Welsh, vice president of technology services, BECU. “We think Foglight can help companies understand and manage the dynamic changes created by virtualization, and importantly minimize the risk of virtual events impacting critical applications.”

Along with providing customers increased insight into virtual infrastructures, Foglight delivers a set of capabilities that enable organizations to:

• Contain alarm storms created by the virtual machines and physical servers
• Track virtual machines from one physical server to another
• Show the impact that multiple virtual machines, which share physical resources, have on one another as virtualization policies change
• Receive root-cause diagnostics and expert advice
• Monitor VMotion events that dynamically move virtual machines
• Customize views for IT operations, the data center team and management