SpringSource Hyperic 4.4 was released earlier this week that brings enhanced management of VMware virtualized environments through integration with VMware vCenter.  While Hyperic has long had support for VMware technologies (a.k.a. VMware Infrastructure or VI), the availability of the VI Java API (http://vijava.sf.net) made our jobs much easier, because the power SDK streamlined how a Java application can interact with VI back then.  By adopting the VI Java API, we were able to keep up with VMware's evolution easily from VI to VMware vSphere, as it is known today.  This also allowed us to communicate directly with both ESX and ESXi servers without differentiation or modification as those technologies evolved.  As VMware became an increasingly larger component of the datacenter infrastructure, it began to seem incomplete to manage each ESX and ESXi server as a separate entity while it is a member of a larger infrastructure.  In fact, VMware moved forward with overlaying technologies over the physical hardware resources to bind them together in a holistic environment called vSphere.  The management of VMware vSphere is handled by a software initially named VirtualCenter, and is now dubbed vCenter.  Being part of the VMware family, we began to realize that our VMware support needed to evolve beyond simply leveraging an easy-to-use SDK.  As we learned more about the latest vSphere technology from our new VMware colleagues, we realized that we needed to rethink how we support the monitoring and performance management of vSphere environments.  Hyperic 4.4 is the result of that re-architecture of Hyperic's VIM plugin, which has been deprecated in favor of a new vSphere plugin.  It makes much more sense to use VI Java to invoke the vCenter APIs, which provided much more functionalities than ESX or ESXi and can query for the data aggregated at the vCenter server.  Certainly, there is an obvious benefit to consolidating the number of vSphere connections to a single one.  Furthermore, there is the newer ability to perform and track vMotion in vCenter that you would not be able to do elsewhere.  The new level of vSphere integration through vCenter yields many new benefits and features in Hyperic 4.4, some of which include: