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

Happy Christmas and wishing all of the virtualization community a Happy New Year too!!!

This video walks you through how to use the PHD Virtual Backup Exporter to export backup data for long term storage.

Find out more about PHD Virtual Backup 5.3 for VMware and Xenserver!

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

VMware has released version 4.1 (a minor update of 4.0) of Apple Mac: Fusion, their desktop virtualization platform.

This version now supports running Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard as guest OS additional to running the already supported OS X Lion, OS X Lion Server, Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server and Mac OS X Leopard Server.

New features and improvements:

• Smart Full Screen, providing full screen mode
• Automatic Virtual Machine power on
• Improved animations
• Fast screen re-sizing and improved startup time
• Improved Mac OS X Lion guest OS support
• Improved graphics performance

VMware also stated in a blog post that the support for running Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard will be removed in a future update for Fusion

PHD Virtual today announced the immediate availability of the new PHD Virtual Backup and Replication version 5.3. The new release further extends PHD’s award winning Virtual Backup Appliance (VBA) Architecture with integrated virtual machine replication and significantly enhanced performance, delivering the easiest, fastest and most cost effective solution for protecting VMware and Citrix XenServer virtual environments.

PHD Virtual Backup and Replication version 5.3 includes the following new features and capabilities:

• Enhanced Performance and Scalability – PHD Virtual Backup and Replication raises the bar for virtual machine backup and restore performance with a new optimized IO engine for more efficient backup and restore processing and the ability to support twice the number of concurrent data streams per VBA
• Virtual Machine Replication – Replicating virtual machines has never been easier, more flexible or more efficient. Intelligent Data Replication ensures efficient data transfer leveraging CBT, deduplication and compression. Virtual Machines are replicated directly from existing backups and replicated VM’s can be verified using a built-in test mode.
• Enhanced DR Flexibility – Getting your backup data offsite and restoring your virtual environment from backups in case of a DR event is faster and easier than ever before. Mass Restore enables restoration of multiple virtual machines from a single restore job. Open Export enables export of virtual machine backups to standard OVF providing easier and faster backup and restore from tape or other log term storage devices.

“This new release takes backup, recovery and replication performance to a new level while providing the valuable combination of unparalleled ease of use and seamless scalability that PHD Virtual is known for,” said Paul Throldahl, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing, PHD Virtual Technologies. “With the new features and enhancements in the 5.3 release, customers now have a better way to protect their virtual environments that is faster, easier and more cost effective than any other solution on the market.”

PHD Virtual Backup and Replication version 5.3 is available immediately. Existing customers with an active maintenance agreement are eligible for a free upgrade to version 5.3. For more information you can go to http://www.phdvirtual.com/phd-backup-replication.

This video is a full 40 minute recording of a webinar overview of PHD Virtual’s monitoring solution for VMware vSphere environments.

You can find out more information on PHD Virtual Monitor at: http://www.phdvirtual.com/monitor

PHD Virtual Technologies today announced that it has received an additional round of investment funding from Insight Venture Partners and Citrix Systems, Inc.  Following five consecutive quarters with year over year growth of 50% or higher, PHD Virtual will use the additional capital to accelerate its product development and hire additional sales professionals.

“PHD Virtual is one of our fastest growing portfolio companies and we are very excited about the progress they have made in customer base growth and product portfolio expansion,” said Mike Triplett, Managing Director, Insight Venture Partners.  “Virtualization adoption continues to accelerate and PHD Virtual is well positioned to capitalize on the large and growing market demand for solutions that simplify and optimize virtual environments.”

“Our investment is driven by the strong synergy with our XenServer product line as well as PHD Virtual’s platform agnostic strategy for backup and monitoring of virtual infrastructure,” said Andy Cohen, VP of Strategic Development, Citrix Systems, Inc.  “As a valued partner, PHD Virtual continues to expand the XenServer ecosystem with enterprise class data protection and monitoring solutions that help meet the needs of our joint customers while aligning with our strategy of delivering solutions that support heterogeneous virtualization environments.”

“The business has made great strides in the past year, highlighted by five consecutive quarters of record growth,” said Thomas Charlton, Chairman and CEO, PHD Virtual Technologies.  “I couldn’t be more proud of the team we have here at PHD Virtual. Over the past 5 Quarters we have released 3 new products, expanded our distribution network, and sharply increased our customer base by achieving key competitive wins with our unique and innovative technologies.  The additional capital will allow us to capitalize on this momentum by adding sales personnel, accelerating product development and increasing marketing investments.”