Tue, January 13, 2009 — Techworld — Server virtualization management tools vendor Vizioncore has released a product that will enable users to reclaim unused space on Windows virtual machines.

Thanks to the increasing demands, such as compliance legislation, placed on companies, storage has become a very expensive part of a company's IT expenditure. Vizioncore believes that its offering can help reduce the load. "VOptimize Pro can take resources and allocate it where it's needed," Said Roger Baskerville, vice president Vizioncore EMEA. "It will make resource backup easier."

vOptimizer Pro works by allowing customers to reclaim the 50 to 80 percent of storage capacity that is not being used. It does this by inspecting the virtual machine's file system and subsequently resizing the partition, while also streamlining the guest operating system. Administrators are able to specify the amount of storage headroom required by different categories of virtual machines.

This, in turn, allows a company reduce its own storage costs. Vizioncore estimates that an average resize typically reduces a virtual machine's size by 50 percent meaning that a 50GB virtual machine will be resized to 25GB, saving 25GB. At a nominal price of US$5 (£3) per GB this would equate to savings of $125 (£75) per virtual machine - a considerable saving across a large enterprise.

Vizioncore has also announced that the latest version of vRanger Pro, its backup and restore product will be providing full support for VMware ESXi 3.5. The company claimed that it would be first product to support the ESX 3.5 technology.

VMware ESXi 3.5, which provides a thin hypervisor compared to the full ESX version, has been designed to simplify adoption of virtualisation while improving security. vRanger Pro 3.2.8 won't work on the free version of the product but will provide backup and restore for the licensed versions found in large organizations.

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