VKernel Provides Clarity for Cloud Operations with vOPS 4

Download Press Release in PDF format

Las Vegas, NV and Andover, Massachusetts, USA, August 29, 2011 — VKernel, the award-winning provider of enterprise-class performance and capacity management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, announced today general availability of vOperations Suite™ 4 designed to provide operational clarity for cloud operators and enterprise data centers. The new release introduces full Hyper-V integration, a new visualization engine, and a VM cost index that provides clarity into performance, capacity and cost across datacenters, resources and hypervisors in virtualized environments. The vOperations Suite 4 (also referred to as vOPS™ is available for download and will be showcased this week at VMworld 2011, August 29 through September 1, in Las Vegas at VKernel booth #1027.

Unified Support for VMware, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and RHEV in a Single Application
As hypervisor platforms advance in development, more environments are becoming heterogeneous. This movement is being driven by:

• Development of credible alternatives to vSphere
• TCO, tiers and application OS affinity for particular hypervisor
• ISV restrictions on supported hypervisors
• Mergers and acquisitions where IT departments inherit new environments

To meet the needs of customers with heterogeneous environments, vOPS 4 adds full support for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V to its existing support for VMware vSphere. By building on VKernel’s previous Hyper-V support and interoperability with Microsoft System Center, vOPS 4 enables System Center customers to manage capacity for both Hyper-V and VMware environments from a single solution. Additionally, vOPS 4 can now be installed as either a VHD or VMDK.

The vOPS technology is completely hypervisor agnostic and will enable further expansion of vOPS to additional hypervisors and data from public cloud providers to support hybrid cloud operations. Support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization was announced earlier this month and will be available in 2011 Q4.

Visualizing Workload Balancing Across an Entire Virtualized Environment
As data centers continue to scale, managing the workloads for CPU, memory, storage, network and disk I/O for hundreds to thousands of virtual machines becomes a difficult task. Additionally, workloads may be split between multiple data centers and hypervisors.

vOPS 4 features the new vSCOPE visualization engine that allows VM administrators to view performance, capacity and cost for all environment VMs across multiple data centers and hypervisors on one screen. Problem areas are immediately identified through this holistic view and can be instantly remediated with a single click drill-down to resolution steps. vSCOPE is ideally suited for NOC screen placement to ensure that the cloud environment is constantly balanced and maintaining high performance.

While visualizing the entire environment is critical, the ability to segment and group workloads according to application, criticality, datacenter or other criteria is just as important for effective management. New in vOPS 4 is Smart Business Views that automatically build collections of virtual machines into views based on naming conventions, cluster membership, creation date or any other of 10 VM attributes. Using Smart Business Views, virtualization administrators can automatically slice and dice a large virtualization environment into meaningful groups for management and visualization.

Cost Optimization Capabilities Secure and Enhance Virtualization ROI
Many organizations transition to private clouds to cut down on costs. Other enterprises can’t deploy private clouds but are nonetheless interested in cost reductions. While chargeback is effective for cost recovery, chargeback reporting does not assist with cost optimization.

vOPS 4 contains a new virtualization Cost Index (vCI) that identifies the cost-effectiveness of each VM and stack ranks it against other VMs in the environment. The vCI evaluates the underlying hardware, the resources consumed by the VM, and the VM/host density. Unlike simple chargeback which only reports on costs incurred by an individual VM, the vCI delivers a relative stack ranking of virtual machines costs corrected for VM density to easily identify which VMs are costing IT the most to operate.

Additional Functionality
Additional functionality in vOPS 4 includes:

• Configurable Dashboards – All dashboards in vOPS are now configurable on a per user basis.
• Enhanced Scalability and Performance - 64 Bit appliance support increases application speed and allows growth into several thousand VMs from within an embedded open source database.
• Advanced Chargeback Support – VMs can be priced with a single fixed cost and variable pricing can be created by business view.

"VKernel’s support for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center is an exciting development for our customers," said Edwin Yuen, Director for Cloud and Virtualization at Microsoft Corporation within the Server and Tools Business. "Gaining insight into virtualized infrastructure capacity is a critical management function for cloud deployments and growing virtual environments. We are pleased to work with VKernel to expand these capabilities in Hyper-V environments as well as to heterogeneous VM deployments."

"We’re looking forward to the enhanced environment visibility we’ll get with vOPS 4’s full Hyper-V integration," said Klaas Snater, Sr. Technical Analyst, Smead Manufacturing. "As our Hyper-V environment continues to quickly grow, assessing capacity for the entire environment at a time is nearly impossible. vOPS 4 allows us to see all of this information on one screen and quickly resolve any issues that we find."

"As virtual infrastructures scale and transition to internal and hybrid clouds, IT organizations start to recognize the importance of performance management, capacity management and show-back/chargeback systems," said Alessandro Perilli, Research Director, Gartner. "At the same time, large organizations are looking at heterogeneous virtual infrastructures with renewed interest. Cross data center, cross hypervisor tools will be critical to manage cloud infrastructure complexity."

"vOPS 4 represents a synthesis of development threads from the past year," said Bryan Semple, Chief Marketing Officer at VKernel. "With vOPS 4 we have integrated our Hyper-V and vSphere management, laid the ground work for RHEV support in Q4, wrapped the application in a stunning visualization engine we call vSCOPE, and have pushed the boundaries of traditional chargeback with the new virtualization cost index (vCI). vOPS 4 sets the standard for innovation, value and ease of use in virtualization management."

General Availability
VKernel vOperations Suite 4 is now available for a 30-day trial from www.vkernel.com. The Japanese version of vOPS4 will be available in Q4 2011. Pricing starts at $299 per socket per application.

About VKernel
VKernel is the number one provider of capacity management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments. The company’s powerful, easy-to-use and affordable products simplify the complex and critical tasks of planning, monitoring and predicting capacity utilization and bottlenecks. Used by over 50,000 system administrators, the products have proven their ability to maximize capacity utilization, reduce virtualization costs and improve application performance.

Media Contact
Lisa Williams
+1 (781) 924-1171
lwilliams@vkernel.com