VMware, Inc., a virtualization solutions provider, today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire B-hive Networks, Inc., a privately-held application performance management software company with headquarters in San Mateo, California and principal R&D facilities in Herzliya, Israel. The company states that with this acquisition, it will leverage the B-hive team and technology to offer proactive performance management and service level reporting for applications running within its virtual machines - on both servers and desktops. In addition, it says that B-hive's R&D facility and team will form the core of their newly development center in Israel.

The company articulated that, B-hive has a unique solution that gives infrastructure groups visibility into application performance in virtual environments such as end-user transaction response time, virtual machine utilization and cross-virtual machine dependencies. It adds that unlike OS-based performance monitoring products, the B-hive solution is designed to measure performance across multi-tier or service-oriented architecture applications that are distributed across clusters of ESX hypervisors and virtual machines. Further it says that B-hive's flagship product, B-hive Conductor, not only monitors end-user performance and issues service level reports, but can also proactively resolve application performance problems by automatically triggering actions such as dynamically allocating more resources, migrating the application to a different server, provisioning additional VMs, changing transaction routing, or system re-boots.

It affirms that B-hive Conductor is agent-less, packaged as a virtual appliance and provides open, standards-based interfaces. By integrating with B-hive, enterprise application management products can provide a holistic view of service levels across physical and virtual environments. It claims that now their management partners will now have enhanced ability to manage business services across the enterprise by leveraging service level metrics for applications in a VMware virtualized environment.

"As customers increasingly standardize on the VMware platform to run their business-critical applications, it is critical for virtual infrastructure administrators to ensure the performance of applications from an end-user's perspective," said Stephen Herrod, Ph.D., chief technology officer, VMware. "B-hive's agentless, virtual appliance-based approach goes beyond traditional monitoring approaches to proactively manage application performance to specified levels. These capabilities, combined with VMware's proven virtualization platform, can allow our customers to consistently deliver on their application service level objectives. For example, if B-hive identifies degradation in application response time, it can remediate the problem by automatically instructing VMware Infrastructure to adjust the resources allocated to the application or provision an additional virtual machine with an additional instance of the application. In conjunction with VMware's automated IT service delivery and business continuity capabilities, B-hive's service level management capabilities further deliver on the vision of an automated, always-on, virtual datacenter."

"With this acquisition, VMware gains a unique solution that solves real-world problems, and adds a highly talented engineering team who shares our passion for innovation," added Herrod. "We expect the B-hive R&D team to be an integral part of our new development center in Israel."

"VMware has been a trailblazer in the industry and has given organizations a much better way to plan and execute their IT operations through virtualization, and we are excited to join this winning team," said Yoav Dembak, CEO and co-founder of B-hive. "As customers move from the physical to virtual, our combined solutions will provide even greater visibility into the performance of applications and make it possible to resolve a problem before it occurs. Our shared goal is to improve the end user experience and maximize the value of investments in VMware virtualization."