Coyote Point Systems announced its Equalizer VLB for high application availability and acceleration of VMware virtual servers. Through Equalizer VLB, which utilizes VMware's management API, Coyote Point Equalizer Series systems can monitor the real-time performance of virtual servers, using VMware's information to manage the traffic flowing to VMware Infrastructure Virtual Machines.

Equalizer VLB Beta software is available to now as Phase One of Coyote Point's integration with VMware Infrastructure and is a free download available to users of Coyote Point's Equalizer Series E350si, E450si, E550si appliances. Equalizer VLB is also included in Coyote Point's new fully integrated E650si platform.

"With Equalizer VLB, managers of virtualized data centers can implement pilot virtualization projects now that validate least-cost use of hardware resources and non-stop availability of applications running on VMware virtual servers," said Richard De Soto, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing and Sales for Coyote Point Systems. "By effectively managing the distribution of work across virtual compute resources, hot spots are eliminated and the need to overprovision physical servers to handle load spikes is removed. With Equalizer VLB, IT departments can realize a significant fiscal impact through business continuity (non-stop availability), capital expense (fewer servers) and reduced operational expenses (power, cooling, and management).”

Coyote Point's Equalizer VLB provides:

• Non-stop availability and virtual server-aware intelligent traffic management for Virtual Machine applications running on virtualized servers.
• Fine-grained virtualization that can be optimized with SSL acceleration for secure transactions, Web compression to speed up page downloads and disaster recovery/business continuity for instant failover to a backup site.
• Single IP address remote access for users of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), such as Microsoft Terminal Services and Citrix XenApp. The Equalizer load balancer takes care of routing application requests to the appropriate server.

With the Equalizer VLB Phase One Beta, Equalizer Series appliances can monitor VMware Infrastructure) to determine Virtual Machine status. Coyote Point is an expert at understanding Web server traffic trends and IP networking, whereas the VMware software can monitor other aspects of the VMware server, such as VMware server physical resource utilization.

Phase Two of Equalizer VLB is targeted for the latter part of 2008. This will be a cost-effective chargeable software implementation that provides even tighter integration with VMware servers and will be available as a software license on Equalizer appliances.

VMware can "slice" Virtual Machines and move them to a less busy piece of server hardware. Equalizer VLB Phase Two will enable additional functionality such as tying together multiple Virtual Machines to aggregate the performance of multiple VMware servers optimally and allow upward scalability of virtual servers. Equalizer VLB will be able to "tell" VMware when to move the Virtual Machine or when to manage it (shut it down, power it up, etc.) In addition Equalizer VLB Phase Two will enable more fine-grained monitoring of Virtual Machines.