Phurnace Software announced its flagship Phurnace Deliver product can be leveraged to support virtualization initiatives. The configuration management software enables system administrators to take a "snapshot" of an application environment and instantly build an identical environment on a virtual image, including the configuration settings and the application itself.

With Phurnace Deliver, all of the required settings are made to the web application server, in the correct order. This isn't possible by using file copy, mirroring an environment or using provisioning tools. Phurnace Deliver provides "java application installer" capabilities, which is required for applications to be set up correctly, even in a virtual image.    

"The virtualization trend is driven by the substantial hardware cost savings and the reduction of time spent on establishing and managing a 'real' infrastructure. With Phurnace Deliver, users can take that value proposition to the application layer," said Daniel Nelson, Phurnace vice president of products. "Today, virtualization requires a library of server images that you bring up and down depending on changing organizational demands. Phurnace Deliver can dynamically allocate applications to the up-and-running app servers as well as automate the set up of cluster size, memory allocation, or hundreds of other parameters. Phurnace simply makes the virtualization concept more practical."

Phurnace Deliver can dynamically remove applications from a server or cluster to free up resources for more critical applications and later restore them online after the peak load time has passed. This can be fully automated, therefore dramatically reducing the time spent and potential headaches for systems administrators.

According to research firm IDC, at least 75% of companies with 500 or more employees currently deploy virtual servers, and 45% of all new servers purchased this year will be virtualized.

With Phurnace Deliver, administrators can decide to add or delete an application from a cluster "on the fly" and have all changes take place in real-time (with no down time) as part of a fully automated process. This allows users to scale the capacity of applications depending on resource demand: making better use of servers and delivering improved overall performance.

Phurnace Deliver provides powerful configuration and deployment capabilities that can:

• Automate the deployment of tailored configuration settings along with the binary files for an application (e.g. EAR and WAR files)
• Automate the uninstall of applications and their configuration settings
• Create an inventory of existing configurations
• Move applications from one web app server to another
• Provide a "snapshot" of the full configuration settings of any web application server
• Compare configurations from different servers to quickly identify differences
• Migrate applications from one version of web app server to others
  
  

• Phurnace Announces General Availability Of Phurnace Deliver 3.1