VKernel Announces New Capacity Management Suite

August 25, 2010, Andover, Mass – VKernel, the award winning provider of Capacity Management products for virtualized data centers, today announced the general availability of VKernel Capacity Management Suite 2.0 (CMS 2.0). VKernel CMS integrates previously separate products from VKernel with additional capabilities to create the most powerful integrated suite for capacity monitoring, planning, optimization and chargeback for enterprise environments. Tapping into capacity management experience with over 500 customers including Global 2000 organizations, CMS 2.0 contains significant improvements in scalability, analytics, and automation while still providing a simple to download, simple to deploy, fast time to results application suite.

Scalability Improvements

From a pure performance standpoint, CMS now scales to support the federation of multiple vCenters. In addition, by integrating previously separate products onto a single appliance, CMS reduces the load on connected vCenters by over 60%.

But scalability encompasses more than technological performance. As the number of VMs analyzed by an application increases in scale, the application must maintain its original usability despite the added complexity of more data, more users, and more analytical complexity. CMS contains multiple improvements to enable scalable operations as both the number of VMs and users within a company increase.

• First, enterprises have specific requirements to summarize, drill down, and view capacity information by business unit, application group, data center or other logical grouping. CMS introduces the ability to organize and view resources based on user defined structures. Users can drill down from a summary view to a detail view using their unique organizational structure then, contextually move across the monitoring, planning, optimization and chargeback applications. This contextual navigation ability means fewer mouse clicks to reach more relevant information and results in more actionable information for system administrators.

• The second scalability improvement involves the flexibility in the capacity management calculations. As the number of VMs in an organization scale, so do the requirements for nuanced capacity calculations. Different time zones, different resource types, different application types, all make one size fits all analysis techniques fail in larger environments. CMS now includes specific time slice analysis windows, resource exclusion and inclusion options, and the ability to exclude specific VM groups from any analysis.

Analytical Advancements

In addition to scalability improvements, CMS 2.0 contains improvements to the core capacity analytics engine. These improvements include the usage of storage throughput data in capacity calculations, support for thin provisioning, customizable virtual machine models for space availability calculations, selectable memory metrics, and new capacity change history analysis. The addition of these calculations to the capacity analytics engine provides system administrators with:

• More accurate capacity planning that includes storage throughput
• Awareness of over commitment caused by thin provisioning usage
• Capacity planning forecasts based on application specific VM sizes, not a default, one size fits all model
• Memory usage modeling customized for particular application characteristics
• The ability to compare specific VM parameters to determine what has changed or will change over a given time period

Automation

Finally, CMS 2.0 contains new automation capabilities. As the number of VMs scale into the hundreds, organizations find it increasingly difficult to regularly evaluate and correct resource allocations for virtual machines. CMS has the ability to selectively reclaim unused resources at the push of a button or on a predetermined schedule. Reclamation rules can be applied to further restrict which resources are automatically reclaimed. Only through this selective automation approach can organizations realistically improve ROI on a large scale. And only through this automation can VM system administrators gain additional time in their day.

New Inventory Program

In addition to improvements in scalability, analytics, and automation, CMS 2.0 contains a new product offering: VKernel Inventory 1.0. Inventory indexes all VMs in an environment and allows system administrator to sort, filter, and view all information about a VM from a single pane. Installed as part of Capacity Management Suite, Inventory provides value within 20 minutes from download by automatically indexing all VMs in an environment, serving as the historical record of VM configurations, allowing a single point of reference for all information about a VM and providing robust on-the-fly reporting abilities.

“Capacity management is more than just looking at real time performance graphs,” said Cameron Haight, Research Vice President, Gartner. “It will require an increasingly advanced analytics capability especially as organizations scale-out their infrastructures. Enterprises with plans for larger VM environments should incorporate capacity management as a key component of their virtualization (and cloud) strategy.”

“Capacity management is a problem of scale,” said Bryan Semple, Chief Marketing Officer for VKernel. “Capacity Management Suite 2.0 was designed to meet the ever increasing capacity management demands of larger and larger virtual machine deployments. By creating the industry’s only scalable, integrated suite, VKernel is setting the standard for capacity management solutions.”

General Availability

VKernel Capacity Management Suite 2.0 is available immediately for purchase or free 30 day trial at www.vkernel.com. Products integrated into the suite include Capacity Analyzer 5.0, Optimization Pack 2.0, Chargeback 2.0, and Inventory 2.0. Pricing starts at $299 per socket.

About VKernel
VKernel is the leading provider of Capacity Management products for VMware and Microsoft virtualized infrastructures. Our 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 20,000 system administrators, the products have proven their ability to maximize capacity utilization, reduce virtualization costs and improve application performance.