JDisc’s release train arrived today at version 3.1!

Just right in time for its fifth anniversary, we publish release 3.1 of our network inventory and documentation solution “JDisc Discovery”. The new release has three major focus areas:

Core Enhancements:
There are many different enhancements that made their way into our core product. JDisc identifies VirtualBox instances running on Linux, Solaris, and MAC OS X and associates the virtual computer to its physical host. MAC OS X support has been improved by getting wireless network and interface speed on all MAC OS X computers. JDisc also determines the parent processes for each running process.

Additionally, JDisc identifies many new devices:

• Adtran NetVanta router
• Fore ASX and ES Switches
• Avaya Media Gateways
• H3C access points and access point controller
• Huawei Quidway router
• Huawei VRP Routers
• Avaya Media Gateways
• Cisco Access Pointer Controllers
• HP Comware Load Balancers
• H3C Access Point Controllers
• H3C Fibre Channel Gateways
• HP EVA Storage Works Array Controllers
• Lantronix SLC Console Servers

Under the hood, we upgraded central JDisc components such as Postgres, Oracle’s Java VM and some internal libraries to the most recent version.

Networking Add-On:
Our last releases always improved our networking add-on and this release is no exception to this tradition. This release adds the possibility to filter network maps by VLAN and include wireless lans within the network map. In order to improve the network topology scan, we have added to option to ping networks in order to populate the MAC forwarding tables within the switches. Read more on the blog entry about wlans within networks maps…

Supportability:
We know that our users are always busy and time is rare. Administrators do not want to spend hours collecting log files or gathering additional support information. That’s why we introduced the one-click-support feature. Just one click and JDisc collects all required support information and puts all information into a single .ZIP file that can be easily sent to JDisc’s support. Also, check out the video tutorials on our homepage.

Customers with a support contract can freely upgrade to 3.1 version.

What’s coming next?

We will be working on improving the support for different virtualization technologies. For instances, we will identify VMware and Citrix XenServer cluster. That’ll allow our customers to associate physical servers and VMs with a cluster or server pool. We are also thinking about enhancing our dependency mapping. Today, the dependency mapping add-on idenfies communication paths between computers on the network. We will enhance the mapping to identify communication paths between processes (and then map them to applications). Especially data center environments will benefit from this feature.