PHD Virtual Technologies Names James Legg as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) to Continue Growth Strategy

PHILADELPHIA, PA – Friday May 11^th, 2012 – PHD Virtual Technologies, pioneer and innovator in virtual machine backup and recovery, and provider of virtualization monitoring solutions, has selected James Legg as the new Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of PHD Virtual Technologies. Prior to joining PHD Virtual James served as Vice President of World Wide Sales and Sales Operations at Idera. He has also previously served as Vice President of Sales at NetIQ Corporation and PentaSafe Security Technologies, where he generated over 1,000% revenue growth in five years.

“I’m excited to join a company like PHD Virtual, with such a strong reputation for innovation in the growing virtualization market,” said James Legg, CEO. He continued, “PHD Virtual’s backup and monitoring products provide enterprise class functionality, but are much more cost effective, easier to use and more scalable than the competition.” He concluded, “The fact that the company has chosen a dual hypervisor approach, with support for both VMware and Citrix XenServer hypervisors, gives our customer’s the ultimate flexibility in managing their virtualization strategy.”

With over 22 years of management experience, James has a proven track record of building and growing companies. Prior to PentaSafe James served as the Director of Sales at Peregrine Systems and BMC Software. James attended the University of Denver and continued graduate studies at the University of Michigan.

“I’ve been in the technology industry for over 20 years and have acquired a broad range of expertise in management, sales and marketing. I’ve been a part of several small companies that have achieved phenomenal growth during my tenure and I look forward to the opportunity to lead an organization that has achieved seven consecutive quarters of record growth, said James Legg, CEO of PHD Virtual.”

Recently VMware warned about multiple security holes discovered in versions 4.0 and 4.1 of its ESX enterprise-level computer virtualization product.

Apparently the Service Console in ESX 4.1 on unpatched systems can be exploited by a local user in a guest virtual machine to gain escalated privileges, or by a malicious remote user to cause a denial-of-service condition or compromise a victim’s system. In its advisory, VMware notes that some of these holes, found in previous versions of the libxml2 XML C parser and toolkit used by the ESX Console Operating System (COS), have been closed by updating libxml2 to a newer release.

Versions 4.0 and 4.1 of ESX are affected; vCenter, ESXi and ESX 3.5 as well as hosted products such as VMware Workstation, Player, ACE and Fusion are not vulnerable. Patches are available for ESX 4.1 that correct these problems here: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2013057

Further information about the vulnerabilities can be found in the company’s security advisory here: http://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2012-0008.html

Today, Iain Mulholland, Director of the VMware Security Response Center, posted a VMware Security Note on one of the VMware corporate community blogs that announced a single file from its ESX hypervisor source code was leaked and posted online. And he alluded to the fact that even more proprietary files may be posted in the future. Mulholland wrote:

Yesterday, April 23, 2012, our security team became aware of the public posting of a single file from the VMware ESX source code and the possibility that more files may be posted in the future. The posted code and associated commentary dates to the 2003 to 2004 timeframe.

The fact that the source code may have been publicly shared does not necessarily mean that there is any increased risk to VMware customers. VMware proactively shares its source code and interfaces with other industry participants to enable the broad virtualization ecosystem today. We take customer security seriously and have engaged internal and external resources, including our VMware Security Response Center, to thoroughly investigate. We will continue to provide updates to the VMware community if and when additional information is available at http://blogs.vmware.com/security/

The potential risk of the leaked source code file really depends on what piece of the code was compromised. Is it part of the old Console? Or is it part of the VMM? VMware’s source code is proprietary and closed, but the virtualization giant does share it with a few select companies outside of their walls. VMware has a co-development program called the Community Source Program which provides access to source code for ESX to enable qualified partners to develop new features and/or advanced virtualization technology that can be integrated with VMware Infrastructure. For the most part, I believe the program was created to help support hardware vendors so that they could create drivers and such, as an example.

In 2008, VMware introduced a more slimmed down version of ESX, called ESXi. It was a more secure platform, having removed things such as the old console, and it’s smaller size allowed it to be distributed and embedded into server motherboards.

VMware is looking for the breach. Now we wait until we learn more about what exactly was leaked and if anything else is leaked in the coming days, weeks or months.

VMware has produced a new online publication with the purpose of raising the awareness among its customer and prospects about the new R&D areas where the company from Palo Alto is investing.

This first publishing covers distributed resource management, user experience monitoring and a couple of other topics:

1. Introduction
2. VisorFS – A Special-purpose File System for Efficient Handling of System Images
3. A Software-based Approach to Testing VMware® vSphere® VMkernel Public APIs
4. Providing Efficient and Seamless Desktop Services in Ubiquitous Computing Environments
5. Comprehensive User Experience Monitoring
6. StatsFeeder: An Extensible Statistics Collection Framework for Virtualized Environments
7. VMware Distributed Resource Management: Design, Implementation, and Lessons Learned
8. Identity, Access Control, and VMware Horizon
9. VMworld 2011 Hands-On Labs: Implementation and Workflow

VMware will try to publish this journal on a regular basis in the future.

Source: http://labs.vmware.com/publications/vmware-technical-journal

PHD Virtual Technologies have just released PHD Virtual Backup and Replication version 5.4 which includes some exciting new features and improvements that make data protection for virtual IT environments faster, easier and more extensible than ever before.  Version 5.4 delivers a robust application programming interface (API) that makes it easy to integrate backup, recovery and replication into your Enterprise, Public Cloud or Private Cloud infrastructure.

What’s New in Version 5.4:

Extensible API Integration – The new PHD Virtual API and SDK makes it easy to integrate backup, recovery and replication with your existing infrastructure, tools and applications.  It also provides additional flexibility to extend and customize data protection for your virtualized applications.

• Public Cloud, Private Cloud – Integrate data protection with backend systems, management infrastructures and self-service portals.
• Enterprise – Integrate data protection with existing systems, tools, processes and application infrastructures.

License Manager – A new license management interface makes it easy to centrally administer and manage your PHD Virtual Licenses across your entire deployment.

Management Console Performance Improvements – New optimizations improve the interaction and responsiveness of the management console for larger deployments.

Get more information about the new PHD Virtual Backup version 5.4 here: http://www.phdvirtual.com/phd-backup-replication

This is a great package and for a limited time only!

The PHD Virtual Backup Bundle is a combination of industry leading data protection, monitoring and management solutions that makes protecting and managing VMware and Citrix XenServer virtual environments, easier and more cost effective than ever before. The PHD Virtual Backup Bundle brings together the award winning PHD Virtual Backup and Replication and a free edition of PHD Virtual Monitor, providing the technologies and capabilities needed to increase administrator productivity while mitigating the protection and management risks administrators face on a daily basis.

The PHD Virtual Backup Bundle includes the following solutions:

What’s Inside

PHD Virtual Backup Bundle includes two features rich products that help you more effectively protect and manage your VMware and XenServer virtual environments

PHD Virtual Backup and Replication – direct integration with VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer provides the easiest, fastest and most cost effective way to implement reliable data protection and disaster recovery for your virtual environment.

PHD Virtual Monitor – easy, comprehensive monitoring and alerting for your entire virtual and physical infrastructure with both Intelligent Agent and Agent-less monitoring technology.  Consolidated enterprise dashboard, robust reporting and automated remediation without complex coding or scripting.

Bundle Details

PHD Virtual Backup and Replcation is licensed on a simple, cost effective host based model.  Each product license purchased will protect one virtual host along with all of the virtual machines running on that host.  Customers who purchase the PHD Virtual Backup Bundle during this limited time promotion will receive a FREE copy of PHD Virtual Monitor including 6 FREE Monitoring Licenses.  * Limit 1 per customer.  Free Monitoring Licenses can be used to monitor:

• Up to 3 Virtual Machines or Physical Server
• Up to 3 Physical Devices (Storage, Switches, Routers, etc.)

Easily Expand Monitoring

The FREE copy of PHD Virtual Monitor provides complete agent based monitoring for up to 6 licensed systems along with a centralized dashboard and easy, customizable reporting.  PHD Virtual Monitor can easily be extended to monitor additional physical and virtual infrastructure by purchasing additional add-on Agent or Collector licenses for virtual machines, servers, workstations or physical devices.

Take Monitoring to the Next Level With Hypervisor Plug-ins and Save 10%

Add PHD Virtual Monitor Plug-in’s for VMware vSphere or Citrix XenServer and get added insight and visibility into your virtual infrastructure.  Hypervisor plug-ins extend PHD’s Intelligent Agent monitoring with virtualization specific metrics, performance and inventory information obtained directly from vSphere and XenServer API’s.  This gives you a true end to end view of your entire virtual and physical infrastructure in a single, easy to use dashboard.

This press release can be found at: http://www.phdvirtual.com/pr-fy2011results

PHD Virtual Records Record Revenue in 2011 on Strong Customer Growth and Virtualization Product Portfolio Expansion.

Strong Growth in 2011 Highlighted by 75% increase in New Customer Acquisition and Launch of Comprehensive Virtualization Monitoring Solution.

PHD Virtual Technologies, pioneer and innovator in virtual machine backup and recovery, and provider ofvirtualization monitoring solutions, announced record revenue for fiscal year 2011. PHD Virtual continued its trend of strong quarterly growth, with the fourth quarter of 2011 marking the sixth consecutive quarter of record revenue growth for the company. The company achieved significant growth in its customer base with new customer acquisition growing by 75%.

PHD Virtual recorded strong product growth across its VMware and Citrix product lines both domestically and internationally during the year. The company invested in expanding its business with the addition of key distributors in international markets which helped to accelerate international revenue growth, including more than a 50% increase in revenue from the EMEA region. The company also saw success expanding into new markets and increasing sales to existing customers with new releases of its data protection solution and the addition of its new comprehensive monitoring solution, PHD Virtual Monitor.

The new PHD Virtual Backup and Replication version 5.3 was released in the fourth quarter, extending the company’s flagship data protection solution with virtual machine replication, faster performance, and flexible archiving technologies that provide an easier, more cost effective solution for disaster recovery of VMware and Citrix virtual environments. Its PHD Virtual Backup solution continued to achieve significant competitive wins over other vendors including Veeam, Quest and Symantec. Most commonly cited by customers was PHD Virtual’s ability to provide a robust data protection and disaster recovery solution that was significantly easier and more cost effective than alternatives.

“The business continued to grow sharply through 2011 and we are very pleased to record our sixth consecutive quarter of record growth,” said Thomas Charlton, chairman and CEO, PHD Virtual. “We built a solid foundation for the business throughout the year, while expanding our portfolio of data protection and management solutions to take advantage of continued growth in the virtualization market. 2012 will see continued expansion of our product portfolio with planned enhancements and new technologies targeted at optimizing data protection, monitoring and management for the rapidly growing Cloud, Service Provider and Virtual Desktop (VDI) Markets.”

About PHD Virtual Technologies
Delivering the highest performance and most scalable cross platform backup and monitoring solutions on the market and pioneer of Virtual Backup Appliances (VBAs), PHD Virtual Technologies has been transforming data protection for virtual IT environments since 2006. Its award-winning data protection solution, PHD Virtual Backup is used today by more than 3,500 enterprises worldwide to achieve unlimited scalability, high availability and cost effective backup and recovery for VMware and Citrix XenServer virtual machines. Its PHD Virtual Monitor provides a complete, end to end solution for monitoring virtual, physical and application infrastructures in VMware and Citrix environments. PHD Virtual also provides a suite of free virtualization utilities to assist with the administration and management of virtualized environments. For more information, please visit http://www.phdvirtual.com.

VMware supports in-place upgrades on 64-bit systems from vCenter Server 4.x to vCenter Server 5.0. You can upgrade VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 6 or later and vCenter Server 4.0.x to vCenter Server 5.0 by installing vCenter Server 5.0 on a new machine and migrating the existing database.

This upgrade method makes it possible to upgrade from a 32-bit system to a 64-bit system. Alternatively, if the VirtualCenter or vCenter Server database is on a remote machine, you can upgrade the database. vCenter Server 5.0 can manage ESX 3.5.x/ESXi 3.5.x hosts in the same cluster with ESX 4.x/ESXi 4.x hosts.

You cannot upgrade a vCenter Server 4.x instance that is running on Windows XP Professional x64 Edition to vCenter Server 5.0, because vCenter Server 5.0 does not support Windows XP Professional x64. This article provides information about upgrading to vCenter Server 5.0.

VMware KB: Upgrading to vCenter Server 5.0 best practices

Oracle has just released version 4.1.8 of VM VirtualBox. This version which can be considered a maintenance release can be installed on top of any VM VirtualBox 4.1.x installation and is the follow up of version 4.1.6. which was released in November this year.

This version fixes a couple of issues which are described in the changelog.

vCenter Chargeback Manager is an end-to-end cost reporting solution for virtual environments that are using VMware vSphere. vCenter Chargeback Manager provides functionality to define unit costs and calculate the overall costs based on the actual usage or reservation of computing resources. This Web-based application interacts with the vCenter Server Database to retrieve usage information, calculates the cost by using the defined chargeback formulas, and generates cost and usage reports.

vCenter Chargeback Manager runs on an Apache Tomcat server instance. Users interact with vCenter Chargeback Manager through a load balancer (Apache HTTP Server). vCenter Chargeback Manager connects to the vCenter Chargeback Manager database that stores application-specific information, such as the defined chargeback hierarchies, cost models, users, roles, and so on. The application interacts with the vCenter Server using VIM APIs and with the vCenter Server database through a data collector. The data collector communicates with the vCenter Server Database using JDBC.

vCenter Chargeback Manager 2.0 new features include:

• Automatic Report Scheduler
• Different methods to charge thin and thick provisioned virtual machines
• Cost variance and cost optimization
• “Showback” Reporting
• The ability to difine fixed costs based on virtual machine state
• Tier-based storage costing
• Support for raw device mapping
• Complete support for vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5
• Partial support for IPv6
• VM Instance Cost support for all hierarchies in vCenter Chargeback Manager
• Support for burstable billing or 95th percentile billing for the external network traffic in vCloud Director
• Support for overage charging for org vDCs in the Allocation Pool model of vCloud Director
• New cost models and billing policies for vCloud Director