The latest releases of VKernel Capacity Analyzer with Hyper-V and VKernel Chargeback with Hyper-V were designed to provide virtualization administrators with enhanced performance monitoring, capacity planning, and chargeback capabilities for managing their virtual environments. Both applications can be deployed as virtual appliances on cluster shared volume (CSV)-enabled Hyper-V hosts. And both leverage VKernel's patent-pending Capacity Analytics Engine in order to provide additional intelligence and added benefits above and beyond what the underlying hypervisor platform can supply.
VKernel's Capacity Analyzer with Hyper-V provides:
- A visualizing heat map format for performance bottlenecks across the entire data center
- Root cause analysis and actionable recommendations to resolve performance issues
- Future resource issues and identifies the constraining resource
- Capacity planning and capacity management functionality to determine available VM slots
VKernel's Chargeback with Hyper-V provides additional value by including:
- Allocated or actual cost calculations
- Customizable memory, storage, and CPU costs at the application level
- Custom group creation to bundle VMs with applications and business units
- Custom chargeback fields for daily allocation of additional costs, such as data center space
"As recently as a couple of years ago, most management add-ons for VMware provided little more than a few extra alerts, a prettier dashboard, or some cleaner reports," said Bartoletti. "Now we're seeing vendors like VKernel up the ante with analytics, taking vCenter metrics and rolling them up with some intelligence into unified and consolidated health and performance indicators."
Bartoletti also notes that platform providers like VMware aren't just sitting around idle; they're also keeping others on their toes by coming out with products like VMware vCenter Operations. He added, "This is great for virtual infrastructure managers, who are going to be measured moving forward on the performance of virtualized apps, not just on consolidation ratios or physical server cost savings."
VKernel doesn't seem to be too phased by the introduction of VMware's vCenter Operations. In fact, the company told InfoWorld that VKernel's existing products are already doing quite well against the competition because of the company's innovative approach of building a powerful analytics engine into an easy-to-deploy and easy-to-use solution. But as the competition heats up and the virtualized environments become more heterogeneous in the future, VKernel believes its support for Hyper-V will only strengthen their competitive positioning.
In addition to heterogeneous environments, Rosemblat also identified that VKernel is beginning to work with more and more customers who are basing their initial virtualization projects on Microsoft and Hyper-V or are completely moving away from VMware in favor of the Hyper-V platform. VKernel will be well positioned for a homogeneous Hyper-V environment as well.
Currently, a select few VKernel products simultaneously support both VMware and Hyper-V hypervisor platforms. In the past, VKernel products were released with VMware-only support based on market requirements. However, the company told InfoWorld that all of VKernel's products will soon feature compatibility with both virtualization platforms. Keep an eye out for future product announcements.
Bartoletti left this word of caution for the management ecosystem: "Make sure you add true value above the metrics anyone can collect from vSphere or Hyper-V, because multiplatform support alone won't be enough to differentiate -- VMware and Microsoft are also very aware that the real money is starting to come more and more from the management stack."
VKernel Capacity Analyzer with Hyper-V 4.4 and Chargeback with Hyper-V 2.6 are available for a 30-day free trial with pricing starting at $299 per socket per application.
This article, "VKernel expands performance, capacity management on Microsoft Hyper-V," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.