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More VMware Buzz as B-hive Acquisition Announced
When you have most of the marbles, it never hurts to have a few more. For industry leader VMware, the challenge is well-defined: stay ahead of the pack by maintaining market share, keep building the value-added areas of virtualization where high growth is most likely to take place, fill gaps in the existing portfolio, and move towards the company's vision of automated virtual data centers.
VMware's acquisition of B-hive is consistent with those goals, especially the last. B-hive is an application performance management company with headquarters in San Mateo, CA. The 3-year-old privately-held company's core product is the Conductor, which it describes as the first Service Level Control solution for virtualized environments.
Target markets have included retailers and financial organizations. According to Bogomil Balkansky, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Vmware, the company has already been working with B-hive as a partner and much of the current level of product integration is already in place through open API development.
B-hive Conductor is a virtual appliance that resides in the data center and monitors the response time of user transactions and applications, as well as utilization levels of virtual machines. It also provides real-time resource allocation.
Used in conjunction with VMware's existing management tools, Conductor can pinpoint degradations in application response time and dynamically reallocate virtual resources. This includes the ability to migrate applications to a different server, and provisioning additional VMs if necessary.
VMware plans to use the technology to augment customer deployments for both servers and desktops. In addition, B-hive's research and development facility in Israel will form the basis for a new VMware research and development center. Balkansky told Virtualization Review that plans for the R & D projects to be carried out are still being finalized.
About the Author
Tom Valovic is a freelance technology writer.