California-based Net Optics' (News - Alert) hallmark network monitoring solution, Phantom Virtualization Tap, now provides support for all best-of-breed hypervisors – including vSphere 5, KVM and more – at no additional cost, the company announced last week.

In particular, Net Optics has expanded the capabilities of its Phantom Virtualization Tap to include support for Xen, a major hypervisor family used by enterprises with large deployments of Citrix, Oracle (News - Alert) VM and other virtualization solutions.

Companies that employ Xen-based virtualization solutions can now leverage Phantom Tap to capture virtual traffic at the kernel layer and deliver it to tools in the physical instrumentation layer, according to Net Optics.

"We're working to keep our customers' networks running at peak performance as they shift to the virtual environment," said Sharon Besser (News - Alert), Net Optics VP of Technology. "Releasing a product with the ability to monitor Xen – a leading hypervisor family – was the next logical customer driven step for us."

Phantom Virtual Tap was created to respond to the growing number of companies that need to monitor both physical and virtual environments. The solution is often deployed by organizations that must comply with various regulatory, security and auditing requirements, such as governments, manufacturing companies and financial institutions.

Check out the TMC (News - Alert) video interview after the jump for an in-depth look at Net Optics and its Phantom Virtual Tap solution, courtesy of the company's Sr. Director Virtualization and Cloud Solutions, Ran Nahmias.

The interview was shot earlier this month at Interop (News - Alert) 2012 in Las Vegas, where Net Optics was selected as a finalist for the Management, Monitoring and Testing award category. Net Optics was honored for its newest network analysis solution, Spyke, based on its technical impact in the field and its potential in advancing the overall business technology market.

The nominees were selected by a group of analysts and editors from InformationWeek Reports.