Even though the software is freely available, it doesn't mean that Hyper9 is leaving money on the table. The company will develop add-on modules for the product that customer can buy to supplement HyperV. These modules may be in the areas of analytics, reporting, troubleshooting, configuration management, disaster recovery and security.

Hyper9 will also launch community sites for users of the software. These communities will allow developers and other users to create add-in modules for Hyper9 and for them to interact with each other.

Hyper9 will be in general availability in September at VMworld. Versions of the software that work with Microsoft's Hyper-V and Xen are expected to be available next year.

The company, based in Austin, Texas is headed up by Chris Ostertag, formerly of Waveset and Tivoli Systems. It evolved out of InovaWave, a virtualization performance management company. The company was founded by Chris Ostertag, Ben Rouse, chief product officer and Dave McCrory, CTO. Hyper9 is funded for $9 million by Matrix Partners and Silverton Partners and has about 20 employees.

© 2009 CXO Media Inc.