Andover, Massachusetts, USA, April 11, 2012 — VKernel, the number one provider of capacity planning and performance monitoring products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, today announced a new white paper entitled, “Maximizing Virtual Machine Performance” and a VM performance podcast series by VKernel/Quest vExpert and Evangelist, Mattias Sundling.  

“A well-tuned foundation enables you to make better use of your virtual infrastructure. Optimizing CPU, memory, disk and network will improve performance and make your virtual environment more efficient to manage”, says Mattias. “I have spent the last 10 years working as a Consultant and Evangelist at VKernel/Quest focusing on virtualization. Over the years, I have seen a lot of mistakes and picked up these useful performance tuning methods.” 

This white paper is a guide to performance tuning in order to maximize VM performance in your environment.  Based on the “Maximizing Virtual Machine Performance” white paper, Mattias is featured in a three-part podcast series with VKernel Product Manager, Alex Rosemblat, and VKernel Chief Marketing Officer, Bryan Semple.  In these podcasts, Mattias, Alex and Bryan dive into CPU, memory, disk, network and Guest OS optimization in order to maintain optimal VM performance.

Mattias Sundling’s “Maximizing Virtual Machine Performance” whitepaper is available at: http://www.vkernel.com/resources/whitepapers/maximizing-virtual-machine-performance.

The three-part podcast series are available at:
Maximizing VM Performance Part 1: http://www.vkernel.com/podreader/items/vkerneltv-no-24-maximizing-vm-performance-with-mattias-sundling-part-1
Maximizing VM Performance Part 2: http://www.vkernel.com/podreader/items/vkerneltv-no-25-maximizing-vm-performance-with-mattias-sundling-part-2
Maximizing VM Performance Part 3: http://www.vkernel.com/podreader/items/vkerneltv-no-26-maximizing-vm-performance-with-mattias-sundling-part-3

A free trial of VKernel’s vOPS Server Standard which provides enterprise class capacity planning and performance monitoring made easy can be downloaded from: http://www.vkernel.com/download/server-standard

About VKernel 
VKernel, an independent subsidiary of Quest Software (NASDAQ: QSFT), is the number one provider of virtualization 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

Aliso Viejo, CA, April 3, 2012
Tweet this: New vFundamentals bundle created by @Quest to simplify #VMware management for #SMBs http://bit.ly/H8Qy5f

News Facts:
Quest Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: QSFT) today announced the availability of vFundamentals, a new product suite that delivers best-in-class backup, capacity planning and resource optimization for VMware virtual environments. vFundamentals enables virtualization administrators to confidently grow their virtual environments knowing that critical assets are properly utilized and protected. Attainably priced at $995 per CPU, the new bundle includes Quest vRanger® Pro, the market’s leading VMware backup, replication and recovery solution, as well as capacity management and optimization technology from VKernel’s vOps Server Standard Edition.

• Packaged with the needs of small- and mid-sized businesses in mind, vFundamentals provides virtualization and systems administrators with a cost-effective, scalable solution that requires minimal customization and can be put into production quickly, enabling them to protect, manage and optimize their growing VMware virtual environments.
  
  • One of the only backup products to achieve VMware Ready status for vSphere 5, vRanger Pro delivers highly optimized virtual data protection. It features a patented Active Block Mapping technology that reduces network payload and storage space requirements. Its parallel job execution and dynamic resource management capabilities enable users to scale with confidence.
  • VKernel’s vOps Server Standard Edition simplifies capacity planning by enabling users to visualize multiple capacity issues at a glance; calculate remaining available VM slots; forecast future resource requirements and reserve capacity for planned deployments; and predict future capacity bottlenecks.
  • For resource optimization, VKernel’s technology also collects information directly from VMware’s vCenter and analyzes thousands of data points across the entire virtual environment, giving users the ability to quickly and easily identify resource efficiency issues, make resource allocation recommendations, and safely and automatically resize virtual machines.
• vFundamentals will be sold through the channel at an SMB-friendly price point of $995 per CPU.

Supporting Quotes:

• John Maxwell, vice president, data protection product management, Quest Software
  “Backup and recovery, capacity planning, and resource optimization are three of the biggest pain points SMBs encounter as they look to grow out their virtual environments. With vFundamentals, Quest is leveraging its product portfolio to bring them a solution that addresses all of those challenges. Packaging VKernel’s capacity planning and resource optimization capabilities with vRanger, Quest’s market-leading VMware backup, replication and recovery solution, creates a comprehensive virtualization management bundle that delivers the simplicity and cost-effectiveness SMBs need.”

• Bryan Semple, chief marketing officer, VKernel
  “As SMBs continue to grow their virtual environments, they are in need of an easy-to-use and affordable end-to-end solution that allows them to ensure their virtual assets are properly managed and protected. The combination of vRanger and VKernel technology meets those needs, and does so in a single package that’s easy to buy, easy to use, and easy to manage."

RSS Feeds:

• Quest news releases: www.quest.com/rss/news-releases.aspx

Technorati Tags:

• Quest Software

Supporting Resources:

• Quest Software, Inc.: http://www.quest.com/
• More Quest news: http://www.quest.com/newsroom/
• vRanger community: http://communities.quest.com/community/vranger
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/Quest
• Facebook: www.quest.com/facebook
• LinkedIn: www.quest.com/linkedin
• Quest TV: http://www.quest.com/tv/
• VKernel: http://www.vkernel.com

About QuestEstablished in 1987, Quest Software (Nasdaq: QSFT) provides simple and innovative IT management solutions that enable more than 100,000 global customers to save time and money across physical and virtual environments. Quest products solve complex IT challenges ranging from database management, data protection, identity and access management, monitoring, user workspace management to Windows management.

# # #

Quest, Quest Software, and the Quest logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Quest Software in the United States and certain other countries. vRanger is a trademark or registered trademark of Vizioncore Inc. in the United States and certain other countries. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Andover, MA, April 3, 2012 — VKernel, the award-winning provider of enterprise-class capacity management and performance monitoring products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, announced today expanded analytics with the release of vOPS Server Standard 4.7.  New accelerated growth algorithms available in this update recognize unusual changes in VM performance. This capability can alert VM administrators to issues that are beginning to develop as soon as a deviation in VM performance can be detected.

VM Performance Issues Usually Caused by Shortages in Resource Availability

VM performance issues often occur when resource utilization in VMs, hosts or datastores grow to a point where no more resources are available. However, by the time this growth becomes sufficiently noticeable to a VM administrator, it may be difficult or impossible to stop a VM performance issue, especially if purchasing more hardware is the only way to avoid a problem.

Existing Analysis Methods Lack Sensitivity to Catch Accelerated Growth Early On

Existing analytic methods lack sensitivity to detect growth acceleration in resource usage. Threshold-based alarms will only alert VM administrators when resource use has grown to a warning level. Once those levels are reached, it may be too late to solve an emerging VM performance problem. Self-learning analytics may not identify accelerated resource growth as “abnormal”. This classification is highly dependent on the mathematics employed and the past performance observed in the environment. Additional analytics must also be incorporated into detection methods to determine at what time accelerated growth in resource usage will cause performance problems.

vOPS Server Standard 4.7 Detects Accelerated Growth As Soon As It Begins

Accelerated growth algorithms in vOPS Server Standard 4.7 follow the resource usage growth of 20 key VM performance metrics and continuously forecast metric levels at the existing growth rate. If this growth rate increases, the accelerated growth algorithms can trigger alarms to immediately warn of an abnormality and will importantly forecast when the resource will run out. This early detection spots issues before they reach the warning levels in a threshold-alarm, and may identify issues before a metric is classified as “abnormal” based on a self-learning algorithm. Ultimately, this advanced notice provides VM administrators with the greatest amount of time to resolve a VM performance issue before it begins to affect end users.

“The sooner an environment becomes aware of an impending issue, the more time there is to put steps in place to avoid performance issues,” says Bernd Harzog, The Virtualization Practice.  “Alerting VM administrators that a resource’s usage growth has accelerated will provide early warnings signs on changes that should be investigated.”

“We are pleased to make available enhanced analytics that increase the sensitivity of our monitoring capabilities to emerging performance issues”, says Bryan Semple, Chief Marketing Officer, VKernel, “Our customers work to proactively avoid VM performance issues. Accelerated growth algorithms allow for the earliest possible detection of changes in resource usage that can turn into a performance problem.”

General Availability

vOPS Server Standard 4.7 is available now for a 30-day trial from www.vkernel.com. Pricing starts at $549 per socket.

About VKernel

VKernel, an independent subsidiary of Quest Software (NASDAQ: QSFT), is the number one provider of virtualization 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

Andover, Massachusetts, USA, March 29, 2012 — VKernel, the award-winning provider of enterprise-class capacity management and performance monitoring products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, announced today the addition of a new free utility to its vOPS Server Explorer product.  This new utility provides a “Google-like” search into the virtual environment and complements the existing VM health visualization utility in vOPS Server Explorer.

As virtual environments grow to hundreds or thousands of virtual machines, finding individual VMs, or identifying which VMs share certain traits, becomes difficult and time-consuming. Virtualization administrators must eyeball data within VMware vCenter, or download data sets and manipulate these in a spreadsheet to gain the necessary insights into which VMs in an environment fit certain criteria. Manually, the VM search process can take minutes or even hours for each query that is sought. Because virtualized environments are dynamic and change frequently, this search process must then be repeated in real-time each time a virtualization administrator requires specific environment information.

vOPS Server Explorer now includes the capability to find specific VMs in an environment in seconds with technology based on VKernel’s SearchMyVM, a utility named by KendrickColeman.com as one of the Top 10 Free vSphere Tool and Utility for 2011. Kendrick Coleman asked in his Top 10 Free tools list review of SearchMyVM, "Haven't you always wanted to let other people do their own searches so you aren't being bothered with generating reports all day?” Now, VM administrators that install vOPS Server Explorer will be able to run these searches to find VMs and other objects in their virtual environments.

Delivered as a virtual appliance, vOPS Server Explorer scans an environment to collect VM metrics data. This data is analyzed by vScope Explorer, the existing utility in vOPS Server Explorer, to visualize the performance, capacity and efficiency health of all VMs, datastores and hosts in the environment. The new search utility, SearchMyVM Explorer, indexes an environment‘s virtual machines, hosts, clusters, resource pools, files, snapshots, VMware tools, applications, and configuration information. VM administrators using vOPS Server Explorer can type in ad hoc search terms and save specialized queries that identify subsets of virtual objects such as:

• Virtual Machine (VM) Snapshots
• Number of specific vendor or hardware model deployed
• Which VMs have up-to-date VM tools installed

“It’s a natural evolution for VKernel to combine the technology from our top 10 free virtualization utility with the VM health assessment utility in vOPS Server Explorer,” says Bryan Semple, Chief Marketing Officer, VKernel. “Adding this capability helps VM administrators better understand what is occurring in their virtualized environments and quickly get VM configuration information they need to keep their network running efficiently and without interruption.”

“Finding VMs with particular characteristics can be challenging and time-consuming, especially as environments continue to grow,” says Vladan Seget, ESX Virtualization. “The new utility in vOPS Server Explorer makes it easy to find VMs and hosts, and is a useful free tool for a VM administrator to help gain further visibility into the virtual objects in an environment.”

General Availability
vOPS Server Explorer with the expanded “Google-Like” search capability, SearchMyVM Explorer utility, is available for download from http://www.vkernel.com/download/server-explorer. vOPS Server Explorer installs in minutes as a virtual appliance and is provided free of charge.

About VKernel
VKernel, an independent subsidiary of Quest Software (NASDAQ: QSFT), is the number one provider of virtualization 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

Andover, Massachusetts, USA, March 20, 2012 — VKernel, the number one provider of capacity planning and performance monitoring products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, today announced a new white paper entitled, “Ins and Outs of IOPS” by VKernel Senior Systems Engineer Brad Bonn. 

This white paper is a guide to help IT administrators gain a better understanding of IOPS, storage I/O and the impact storage has on non-virtualized and virtualized performance.  IT admins will learn about storage performance measurements, metrics and tuning techniques as well as troubleshooting techniques for performance problems or unexpected latency on a shared storage solution.  IT admins will also gain insight into how to evaluate their environment during implementation or expansion of their existing storage in order to make appropriate allocation decisions for optimal performance. 

Brad Bonn’s “Ins and Outs of IOPS” whitepaper is available at:
http://www.vkernel.com/resources/whitepapers/ins-and-outs-of-iops

A free trial of VKernel’s vOPS Storage Monitor which provides end-to-end visibility of storage infrastructure, alarms, and performance metrics from VM to spindle can be easily downloaded at http://www.vkernel.com/download/storage-monitor.

About VKernel

VKernel, an independent subsidiary of Quest Software (NASDAQ: QSFT), is the number one provider of virtualization 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

Andover, MA, March 8, 2012 — VKernel, a subsidiary of Quest Software and the award-winning provider of enterprise-class performance and capacity management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, announced today the company’s virtualization industry podcast series, VKernel.TV, ranked as a top ten Favorite Podcast in the vSphere-Land 2012 Top Blog Results. Recently announced, the 2012 Top Blog Results is an annual ranking of the top worldwide VMware and virtualization blogs and podcasts.

With thousands of subscriptions, views, and downloads from YouTube, iTunes, and vkernel.com, the VKernel.TV series successfully placed in the top of the podcast division. VKernel.TV aims to enhance knowledge of the virtualization industry by broadcasting interviews with thought leaders, Virtualization Gurus and vExperts on a broad spectrum of topics and best practices.

The most viewed/downloaded VKernel.TV podcasts in the past include:
Self-Learning Analytics with Eric Jackson 
VMGuru.nl at the Dutch VMUG
VM Memory Sizing Considerations with Brad Bonn 

Joining VKernel on the list is Quest’s Scott Herold, who placed in the top 50 virtualization blogs with VM Guru.

“For our first year with the podcast, it’s great to be included on a list of so many influential bloggers and thought leaders in virtualization,” stated Bryan Semple, CMO of VKernel and co-host of the podcast. “Part of our mission at VKernel is to share knowledge of best virtualization practices with VM admins and we’re glad to see our content has so quickly made an impact.”

About VKernel
VKernel, an independent subsidiary of Quest Software (NASDAQ: QSFT), is the number one provider of virtualization 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

Andover, MA, March 6, 2012 — VKernel, a subsidiary of Quest Software and the award-winning provider of enterprise-class performance and capacity management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, announced today the expansion of its award-winning vOperations Suite ^TM (also referred to as vOPS). Now available as part of the vOperations Suite are products from VKernel’s parent company, Quest Software. The enhanced vOPS product suite offers a single solution for VM administrators to manage all infrastructure areas related to their virtualized data centers and cloud environments. Specifically, the unified vOperations Suite extends monitoring capabilities to other hardware areas and layers of the infrastructure including the storage area network (SAN), the guest OS inside a VM and physical servers that have not been virtualized. This unified offering bolsters Quest Software’s position as the leading independent virtualization management company.

Virtualization administrators have long searched for a data center management system to gain visibility across the many layers that make up a virtualized environment: from storage array to guest OS. Previous attempts to gain this holistic visibility have either required multiple vendors, or have involved complex large-scale management platforms that are time consuming and not cost efficient. The enhanced vOPS product line provides VM administrators with an out-of-the-box solution to monitor, capacity plan, chargeback, report on and optimize their entire virtual environment that can be set up in minutes.

“Virtualized environments are complex, multi-tiered systems made up of several hardware components and abstraction layers,” says Bernd Harzog, The Virtualization Practice. “Because resource usage is interconnected, a failure at any point in the infrastructure can cause issues in other areas. The only way to pinpoint where an issue is originating is to have visibility into every infrastructure area that constitutes the virtualized environment.”

The new vOperations Suite is built around two broad product lines: vOPS Server and vOPS Storage.

vOPS Server focuses on server management with three editions: 

• Explorer (Free) – Designed to assess the health of a virtualized environment, the Explorer Edition immediately identifies VMs, hosts and datastores that are suffering performance, capacity and efficiency issues. Users can upgrade to a free trial of the Standard Edition to remediate any issues identified with the click of a button.
• Standard ($549/socket) – An easy to install, rapid time to value application that works “out-of-the-box” to provide virtual server performance analysis, capacity management, optimization and chargeback. vOPS Server Standard Edition(formerly VKernel vOPS) will detect issues in VMs, identify root cause and provide remediation steps that can be automatically implemented.
• Enterprise ($799/socket) – Adds the former Quest Software vFoglight product on to the Standard Edition. Enterprise allows data centers to extend near real-time monitoring into applications such as SQL Server and Microsoft Exchange, the guest OS and non-virtualized servers. The Enterprise edition is vastly scalable and can manage tens of thousands of VMs in a single pane of glass that includes highly configurable dashboards and environment characteristics.

vOPS Storage focuses on storage management with two editions:

• Monitor ($499/socket) - For VM administrators who require deep visibility into the SAN or are also the storage administrators, vOPS Storage Monitor visualizes the topology from VM to disk. Formerly vFoglight Storage, this solution displays the SAN and the interconnection between various components highlighting where issues are present and the root causes to the problems.
• vOptimizer ($299/socket) – The former Quest Software vOptimizer Pro detects VMs that are running out of disk space, are over-allocated in storage or have misaligned disk block partitions. All of these issues can then be instantly remediated with automation capabilities.

“The new vOPS product family provides unparalleled visibility into both non-virtualized and virtual environments,” said Bryan Semple, CMO, VKernel. “Combining market leading products from our parent company, Quest Software, with VKernel’s award-winning vOperations Suite allows both companies to provide virtual administrators the ability to proactively manage their entire virtualized environment at a price point that won’t break the budget.”

“Quest Software’s acquisition of VKernel is a win-win for all our customers,” said Shayne Higdon, SVP & GM, User Workspace Management and Monitoring, Quest Software.  “VKernel is a pioneer in offering solutions that allow virtualization administrators to ensure performance and balance costs in their virtualized network environments. The enhanced vOperations Suite will help these customers vastly simplify their day-to-day operations and bolster the support that Quest Software can offer a data center.”

General Availability
The new vOPS product family is available now for a 30-day trial download from www.vkernel.com/download. vOPS products are available from http://www.vkernel.com and Quest partners worldwide.

About VKernel
VKernel, an independent subsidiary of Quest Software (NASDAQ: QSFT), is the number one provider of virtualization 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

Andover, Massachusetts, USA, February 16, 2012 — VKernel, the number one provider of capacity planning and performance monitoring products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, today announced a vCPU sizing guide for VM administrators. In a new white paper entitled, “vCPU Sizing Considerations” by vExpert David Davis and VKernel Product Marketing Manager Alex Rosemblat, virtualization administrators will gain a deeper understanding of vCPU and be able to easily make the right decisions related to vCPU sizing. 

Because vCPU is a finite resource in a server and is also one of the most dynamically demanded resources by the guest OS in each VM, vCPU VM allocation is very difficult. Furthermore, virtualization administrators need to avoid over-allocating vCPU’s because doing so wastes expensive server resources and will minimize ROI on that infrastructure. VM administrators face a difficultly in balancing the need to maximize ROI of the server hardware and the requirement for applications to perform optimally. 

Fortunately, with the right tools and the guidance in this white paper, VM administrators will learn: 

• How to correctly size VMs in an environment
• How to approach appropriate sizing of new VMs that need to be deployed 
• How to institute a regular CPU Sizing process for the data center 
• How CPU usage works at different levels of the virtualization “stack” 
• How to screen for CPU-based VM performance issues before attempting to optimize an environment 
• What VM performance metrics can provide insights on CPU and how to access them

VKernel’s “vCPU Sizing Considerations” whitepaper is available at: http://www.vkernel.com/resources/whitepapers/vcpu-sizing-considerations.  

A free trial of VKernel’s vOperations Suite which provides enterprise class capacity planning and performance monitoring made easy can be downloaded from http://www.vkernel.com/products/voperations-suite/overview. 

About VKernel
VKernel, an independent subsidiary of Quest Software (NASDAQ: QSFT), is the number one provider of virtualization 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

Andover, MA, January 18, 2012 — VKernel, the award-winning provider of enterprise-class performance and capacity management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, announced today availability of vOperations Suite™ 4.6, which adds support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization virtualized infrastructure in line with today’s release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0. The VKernel vOperations Suite now supports virtualization management for mixed virtualized environments running VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V or Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as a virtualization platform.

Scaling Environments Require Capacity Management Support
To manage performance, capacity and costs in virtualized environments, VM administrators need to monitor over 20 metrics per virtual machine on at least a five minute interval. With just 100 virtual machines, that means that 17 million data points would need to be monitored and analyzed over a 30 day period to correctly monitor VM performance, capacity and costs. More importantly, VM administrators must translate all that data into actionable information such as:

• What is happening?
• What is causing a change?
• What must be done to resolve a noted issue?

At this data volume, simple monitoring or manual analysis with Microsoft Excel is not sufficient to provide the answers that VM administrators require. VKernel's Capacity Analytics EngineTM is designed to take raw VM performance data on a near real time basis and provide actionable results, such as answers for the questions posed above, for busy VM administrators. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 customers face similar challenges as other hypervisor users especially as new features in Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 are designed to enable environments to scale faster.

Heterogeneous Environment Support Driven by Several Factors
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 offers compelling features designed to push hypervisor performance to new levels, features such as user-driven extensibility and the ability to deploy the management server on Linux.

VKernel is committed to supporting multiple hypervisors and other virtualization platforms such as public cloud offerings in a manner that is transparent to virtualization administrators. Today’s announcement of full support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization adds to previously released support for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. Ultimately, VM administrators should be able to manage performance, capacity and costs in their virtual environment from one virtual appliance regardless of the hypervisors in use.

“We are very pleased to collaborate with VKernel in line with the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 and vOPS 4.6 today to enhance capacity management support for our customers,” said Navin Thadani, senior director, Virtualization Business at Red Hat. “The enhancements in Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 will allow our customers to deploy high-performance virtualization and scale faster and more effectively. As these Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environments continue to grow, our customers will be able to make use of VKernel's advanced management solutions to help them increase VM densities while maintaining application performance.”

“We’re excited to introduce full Red Hat compatibility into the vOperations Suite,” says Bryan Semple, CMO, VKernel. “We have many customers beginning to explore and even implement heterogeneous hypervisor platforms within their virtualized data centers. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization offers a unique virtualization value proposition and VKernel now offers capacity management support for data centers that choose to implement this enhanced offering from Red Hat.”

To download a free, fully supported 60-day trial of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0, visit www.redhat.com/rhev3 or the Red Hat Market Place at http://marketplace.redhat.com/rhev.

General Availability
Early availability of the VKernel vOperations Suite 4.6, which supports Red Hat, VMware and Hyper-V and can be installed as a virtual appliance on any one of those hypervisors is available now for a 30-day trial from www.vkernel.com. General availability of vOPS 4.6 will be on January 23, 2012. The Japanese version of vOPS 4.6 will be available in Q2 2012. Pricing starts at $299 per socket per application.

About VKernel
VKernel, an independent subsidiary of Quest Software (NASDAQ: QSFT), 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.

Red Hat is a registered trademark of Red Hat, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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

Andover, Massachusetts, USA, December 19, 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^TM 4.5. Designed to provide new automation capabilities for virtual machine management, the new release introduces advanced VM management task automation which coupled with robust automation controls, offers data centers “trusted automation.” The new version 4.5 of the vOperations Suite (also referred to as vOPS™ 4.5) is currently available for download at www.vkernel.com.

Growing VM Environments Generate an Increasing Volume of Management Tasks
Adequately operating a virtual machine requires undertaking regular management tasks for each VM. Virtual machines must be monitored for performance issues, reviewed for proper resource sizing and reported on for stakeholders to gain insight into health status. Manually executing any of these management tasks – and for each VM - is time consuming. As environments grow, administrators begin to spend increasing portions of their week engaged in manual execution of these routine tasks.

As a result, the only way to support scaling virtualized environments is to increasingly implement automation to eliminate manual VM management or hire additional system administrators. For example, a VM administrator can manually delete approximately 60 abandoned VM images in one hour. With vOPS 4.5’s ability to automate deletion of abandoned VM images, an unlimited amount of files can be removed in seconds. The need for automation becomes particularly acute for cloud deployments, which are purposefully architected to remove manual steps from VM life cycle operations.

“As a managed service provider for the rest of the business, automation of tasks is critical to maintain low operating costs,” says Chris DiGanci, Senior IT Manager, PEER1 Hosting. “VKernel vOPS 4.5 delivers practical automation steps that we can tailor to our environment and will save my team member a significant amount of time.”

Effective VM Management Automation Fulfilled in vOPS 4.5
VM management automation has been introduced in vOPS 4.5 to vastly streamline recommendation execution. For automation to be truly successful, it must allow for:

• “Out-of-the-Box” Functionality that Saves Significant Time – vOPS 4.5 requires only a click-of-a-button, eliminating the need for manual work in a VM management console which can take hours or days. Users can also adjust settings for different infrastructure areas.
• Trusted Automation – vOPS 4.5 features robust control features for automation capabilities that allow virtualization administrators to automatically execute VM management tasks and set “trusted automation” for their environments. With vOPS 4.5, administrators can automatically: delete abandoned VMDK files, merge VM snapshots, solve VM performance issues, power-off Zombie VMs, resize vCPU and VM memory resources based on recommendations, update management dashboards in real-time in external systems, and calculate CPU, memory and storage requirements at any point in the future.

“As organizations continue to deploy more virtual machines, data center staffs are spending a growing percent of their time engaged in routine management tasks,” says Bernd Harzog, The Virtualization Practice. “To avoid significantly growing data center headcount as they scale, virtualized environments will have to begin to employ automation of management tasks to oversee growing VM counts.”

Additional Features
Other features available in vOPS 4.5 include:

• Application type tags to denote which application is running inside a virtual machine
• Storage DRS and storage cluster support available with VMware vSphere 5
• Access to VMware VASA interface storage statistics available with vSphere 5
• Capacity planning calculation adjustments for vSphere 5 HA methods
• Improved support and visibility into Raw Device Mapping (RDM) storage objects
• Additional management reports such as graphs for performance issue counts
• Auto-set VM metric trend alarms that generate warnings when abnormalities are detected

“As our customers experience growth within their own organization, one thing we’ve learned is they have become overwhelmed with executing tedious management tasks,” says Bryan Semple, CMO, VKernel. “vOPS 4.5 directly addresses that pain-point and allows for simple to implement and easy to maintain automation.”

General Availability
VKernel vOperations Suite 4.5 is available now for a 30-day trial from www.vkernel.com. The Japanese version of vOPS 4.5 will be available in Q1 2012. Pricing starts at $299 per socket per application.

About VKernel
VKernel, an independent subsidiary of Quest Software (NASDAQ: QSFT), 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

Andover, Massachusetts, USA, October 26, 2011 — VKernel, the award-winning provider of enterprise-class performance and capacity management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, environments, announced today general availability of vScope Explorer™, the industry’s first free application specifically designed to visualize the performance and capacity health of a virtualized environment. This new application from VKernel provides health visualization capabilities similar to those available within VMware’s vCenter Operations Management Suite but at no cost. 

Virtualization introduces significant management complexity into a data center’s server and storage operations. Virtual machines utilize shared resources, have a high degree of mobility, and are subject to misallocation of CPU, memory, network and storage resources. Assessing the performance and capacity health of these VMs, hosts, and datastores involves collecting, analyzing, and then interpreting large quantities of instrumentation data in real time.

vScope Explorer automatically analyzes this instrumentation data with the same patent-pending Capacity Analytics Engine™ used in the award-winning VKernel vOperations Suite™. Results are presented as a visual summary that can fit thousands of virtual machines onto a single screen. A simple mouse-over shows the cause for the health alert on the impacted object. Specifically, vScope Explorer presents:

• Performance health for all VMs and physical hosts in an environment.
• Capacity health and impending performance issues for all physical hosts.
• Resource efficiency of CPU, memory and storage for all VMs and datastores.

"vScope Explorer makes it easy to see the performance, capacity and resource efficiency status across a virtualized environment," says Kendrick Coleman of KendrickColeman.com, which hosts an index of all free tools for virtualized environments. "This visibility makes it easy to spot when issues arise in a virtual environment, where they are, and what kind of issue it is. This makes vScope Explorer a great addition to any VM administrator’s free utility toolkit."

vScope Explorer presents health visualization capabilities similar to those available in VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite’s but at no cost to an end user. Furthermore, this free tool offers broader infrastructure coverage, faster time to results and greater scalability than VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite as vScope Explorer provides:

• Multi-hypervisor support for Hyper-V VMs, hosts and datastores
• Health assessments of VM and datastore resource efficiency
• Visualization results in less than 24 hours after install

"Virtualized environments are dynamic and complex systems that are difficult to assess for issues, especially as these environments begin to grow," says Bryan Semple, Chief Marketing Officer, VKernel. "We are pleased to provide vScope Explorer as a free application to help virtualization administrators understand the performance, capacity and efficiency issues in their environment. With the ability to display the health for thousands of virtual machines at once on a single screen, virtualization administrators can quickly understand the health of their environment."

General Availability
VKernel vScope Explorer is available for download from the VKernel site. vScope Explorer installs in minutes as a virtual appliance and is provided free of charge.

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

Andover, Massachusetts, USA, September 21, 2011 — VKernel, the award-winning provider of enterprise-class performance and capacity management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, today announced a performance and capacity management guide for VM administrators exploring new VMware vSphere 5 features. In a new white paper titled, “Preparing for vSphere 5’s Unexpected Capacity and Performance Impacts,” by vExpert Greg Shields of Concentrated Technology, administrators will learn how to assess new VMware vSphere 5 capabilities for performance and capacity considerations. This white paper comes on the heels of the recent release of VKernel’s new vOperations Suite™ 4, which provides data to help administrators assess the impact of new vSphere 5 features for virtualized environments as described in this white paper.

VMware’s latest release of vSphere 5 offers robust new features for large and growing virtualized environments, including improvements in storage management, virtual machine sizes, and automated deployment. However, if a VM administrator does not carefully prepare for the new feature implementation, an environment could be adversely affected in cost and performance by unforeseen consequences of these new capabilities, particularly from features such as:

• Storage DRS
• The creation of very large “monster” VMs
• New technologies that facilitate automated VM deployment

These new capabilities in vSphere 5, while useful at face value, can have unexpected impacts to tasks in capacity and performance management that must be closely examined before deploying.

VKernel’s new white paper, “Preparing for vSphere 5’s Unexpected Capacity and Performance Impacts,” describes how to properly assess an environment for impacts from using new vSphere 5 capabilities and offers implementation options for deployment. By following the procedures described in the paper, VM administrators can avoid impacts that can affect capacity and performance to an environment while deploying vSphere 5 functionality.

“The new features in vSphere 5 offer powerful new ways to make virtualized environments more dynamic,” said Bryan Semple, Chief Marketing Officer at VKernel. “Knowing how to assess if a new feature is right for an environment’s needs will allow virtualization administrators to implement new vSphere 5 capabilities with confidence that they’ll have the intended outcome in their virtual environment.”

VKernel’s “Preparing for vSphere 5’s Unexpected Capacity and Performance Impacts” white paper is available at http://www.vkernel.com/resources/whitepapers/vsphere-5-capacity-performance-impacts. A free trial of VKernel’s vOperations Suite which provides enterprise class performance and capacity management made easy can be downloaded from http://www.vkernel.com/download/voperations-suite.

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

Andover, Massachusetts, USA, September 7, 2011 — VKernel, the award-winning provider of enterprise-class performance and capacity management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, announced today that VKernel‘s SearchMyVM has been selected as one of KendrickColeman.com‘s Top 10 Free VMware vSphere Tools and Utilities for 2011. KendrickColeman.com is widely considered to be the authoritative industry index of all free tools and utilities for virtualized environments. The site currently lists and analyzes nearly 70 free tools of which, SearchMyVM was selected for the top 10.

VKernel‘s SearchMyVM, which in its release in September 2008 was noted by VMBlog.com for providing a "Google-like search" of VMs in a virtualized environment, was selected to this list based on an encore VMworld 2011 presentation that showcases useful free products for VMware environments by Kendrick Coleman and David Davis of VMwareVideos. This free tool is available for download at www.vkernel.com and makes it easy to search for VMs that fit specific criteria.

As virtualized environments grow to hundreds or thousands of virtual machines, finding individual VMs, or attempting to identify which VMs share certain traits, becomes difficult and time-consuming. Virtualization administrators must eyeball data within VMware vCenter, or download data sets and manipulate these in a spreadsheet to gain the necessary insights into which VMs in an environment fit certain criteria. Manually, the VM search process can take minutes or even hours for each query that is sought. Because virtualized environments are dynamic and change frequently, this search process must then be repeated in real-time each time a virtualization administrator requires specific environment information.

VKernel‘s SearchMyVM completely automates the VM search process, allowing VM administrators to find specific VMs in an environment in seconds. As Kendrick Coleman states in his Top 10 Free tools list, "Haven't you always wanted to let other people do their own searches so you aren't being bothered with generating reports all day? This application will free up some of your time."

Delivered as a virtual appliance, SearchMyVM indexes an environment‘s virtual machines, hosts, clusters, storage, resource pools, files, snapshots, VMware tools, applications, log entries, and configuration information. Virtualization administrators can type in ad hoc search terms or run pre–built queries that identify subsets of virtual objects such as:

• Virtual machine (VM) snapshots
• Number of specific vendor or hardware model deployed
• VMs running Windows 2000 Server
• VMs that failed to vMotion

"We‘re excited to have VKernel SearchMyVM recognized as a top free virtualization tool,‖ said Bryan Semple, Chief Marketing Officer at VKernel. "SearchMyVM can help VM administrators save minutes to hours of manual lookup every time a "Google-like search" is run. Because this tool is free and easy to deploy, SearchMyVM can quickly provide value to any VMware environment."

VKernel‘s SearchMyVM free tool is available for download at http://www.vkernel.com/download/search-my-vm. Additionally, a free 30-day trial of vOPS™ Reporting & Chargeback—which includes a VM Directory that allows VM administrators to build custom reports of VMs in an environment based on multiple criteria—is available at http://www.vkernel.com/products/reporting-and-chargeback/overview.

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

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

Andover, Massachusetts, USA, August 24, 2011 — VKernel, the award-winning provider of enterprise-class performance and capacity management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, announced today that HP will offer VKernel’s Chargeback with Hyper-V product to clients of its HP Services for Microsoft Private Cloud solution.

Built on HP Converged Infrastructure, Microsoft Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center, HP Services for Microsoft Private Cloud reduce the complexity and cost of IT management by helping clients deploy a fully integrated private cloud. Through the integration of VKernel’s Chargeback with the Hyper-V product, HP Services for Microsoft Private Cloud now include self service, provisioning, back-up, metering and chargeback for private cloud environments that are capable of deployment within 30 days.

The integrated metering and chargeback solution enables clients to collect data for resource usage and charge business units for compute, storage and network resources through a “pay per use” model. This provides the business with an accurate cost for the IT resources needed to run their business.

The VKernel and HP partnership builds on the momentum VKernel is seeing in its growing list of cloud providers and advanced virtualization enterprises. In June, VKernel released vOperations SuiteTM 3.5, which was developed based on requirements identified from over 700 VKernel customers, including a number of enterprises deploying private clouds as well as public cloud and hosting providers.

“Partnering with HP and Microsoft for private cloud deployments provides sales coverage and services expertise that enables VKernel to continue to expand into larger enterprise deployments,” said Doug McNary, CEO of VKernel. “VKernel is committed to helping partners like HP and Microsoft to embed our products and technologies into their enterprise cloud solutions.”

“Enterprises are seeking a real-time view of resource usage and costs associated with private cloud,” said Tom Norton, director, Microsoft Consulting, HP. “VKernel Chargeback for Hyper-V provides fast time-to-value and an intuitive interface, making it the right fit for our private cloud clients.”

Installed as a virtual appliance, Chargeback provides value within 20 minutes from download including:

• Allocated or actual cost calculations
• Customizable memory, storage and CPU costs at the application level
• Custom group creation to group VMs with applications and business units
• Custom chargeback fields for daily allocation of additional costs like data center space
• Automated reporting that can be emailed out in PDF or CSV format

Designed to support customers and partners implementing VKernel data integration initiatives, Capacity.LINK enables customers and partners to join the program for access to the company’s newly released vOPS API, which allows virtualized data centers to integrate the capacity intelligence generated by VKernel’s Capacity Analytics EngineTM into external systems such as help desks, ticketing systems, billing applications, self-service portals, reporting frameworks and systems management consoles.

Please visit www.hp.com/services/coreinfrastructure for more information about HP Services for Microsoft Private Cloud.

Please visit http://www.vkernel.com/partners/microsoft for more information about VKernel’s Microsoft Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center solutions.

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

Andover, Massachusetts, USA, August 22, 2011 — VKernel, the award-winning provider of enterprise-class performance and capacity management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, announced today the company has expanded its global reach. Supporting this is a new EMEA headquarters and general availability of the vOperations Suite™ 3.5 (also referred to as vOPS™ 3.5) in Japan.

A primary goal for VKernel in 2011 has been to expand its global footprint to meet significant demand for performance and capacity management solutions outside the North American market. Today’s announcement marks two key milestones towards meeting this goal. 

First, VKernel is opening a new EMEA headquarters to support operations in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The new headquarters will be located in Reading, UK and will be staffed with sales and marketing employees to drive expansion through direct and indirect channels over the coming quarters. 

Second, Macnica Networks, VKernel’s distributor in Japan, this month began shipping a version of vOPS 3.5 fully localized for the Japanese market. This expansion into Japan is expected to yield significant opportunities as virtualization environments grow in the world’s third largest economy. 

“We are very excited to begin distributing the Japanese localized version of VKernel’s vOperations Suite,” said Masahiro Miyabukuro, President of Macnica Networks. “We see this as a great opportunity to work with our customers and other firms to deploy an award-winning virtualization management solution.” 

“VKernel is committed to accelerating efforts to create a more global footprint of its operations,” said Doug McNary, CEO of VKernel. “Now that our products are shipping in the Japanese market, combined with the opening of our new office in the UK, we are well positioned to support the growing demand of our capacity and performance management solutions as the deployment of virtualized environments grow globally.”

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.

EMEA Headquarters Contact Information
Address:
VKernel Corporation
1650 Arlington Business Park
Theale
Reading RG7 4SA
United Kingdom

Phone: +44 (0) 118 929 8018
Fax: +44 (0) 118 929 8001

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

Andover, Massachusetts, USA, August 16, 2011 — VKernel, the award-winning provider of enterprise-class performance and capacity management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, announced today that Tieto, the leading IT services company in northern Europe, has deployed the VKernel vOperations Suite™ (also referred to as vOPS™) for VMware capacity management and reporting. Tieto joins a number of other cloud and hosting services providers from around the world using VKernel as their VMware management software solution.

Tieto is the leading IT services company in northern Europe, providing virtualized hosting and product engineering services. The company’s highly specialized IT solutions and services are complemented by a strong technology platform that create tangible business benefits for local and global customers. Due to Tieto’s hosting arrangements, resource allocations are constantly adjusted on-demand to accommodate each customer’s price/performance objectives. Managing these changes and monitoring the impacts to the environment had become excessively time consuming and difficult to manage. Tieto had purchased a resource management tool for its VMware environment, but that product did not work as promised and could not perform the essential tasks needed. As Geoffrey Ekman, Technical Specialist, Tieto, describes, “Our data centers are large and growing, so we knew we required some fairly sophisticated management capabilities.” Tieto conducted an exhaustive evaluation of other VMware management solutions and quickly identified VKernel’s vOperations Suite as the best fit for Tieto’s requirements. As Ekman recalls, “It worked right out of the box, and after a couple of hours of navigating through the many options, I felt pretty comfortable about how I could use it to meet our management and planning needs.”

Implementing VKernel has allowed Tieto to automate its virtualized resource management and reporting. Specifically, Tieto has instituted a resource evaluation process using vOPS that identifies VMs with resource misallocations. With VKernel’s vOPS, Tieto is able to both reclaim these resources, which yields bottom line benefits, and accomplish significant performance improvements. According to Ekman, “We would never have thought of doing some of the things vOPS recommends, but the changes always result in some level of improvement.” Additionally, VKernel has automated reporting for customers and internal stakeholders. As Ekman states, “We now publish daily reports for all of our customers to show their current utilization, and where more or fewer resources may be needed. These reports are an integral part of our overall resource management and capacity planning efforts, and without the VKernel suite, we would need to hire full-time employees to generate the reports and make the daily changes in resource allocations to keep pace with our growing customer base.”

“We’re pleased that vOPS has provided immediate financial benefits and has allowed Tieto to streamline its operations,” said Bryan Semple, Chief Marketing Officer at VKernel. “As environments scale, manually monitoring a virtual environment becomes nearly impossible. Our products allow rapidly growing virtualized infrastructures like Tieto’s to automate monitoring, reporting, and other capacity management operations so that virtualization administrators can maintain the performance of their environments without constant firefighting.”

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

Andover, Massachusetts, USA, August 15, 2011 — VKernel, the award-winning provider of enterprise-class performance and capacity management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, announced today plans to add support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to their industry-leading vOperations Suite™. Additionally, VKernel has announced it has joined the Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA), further supporting the company’s strategy of heterogeneous hypervisor support.

Enterprise use of multiple hypervisors is being driven many factors including:

• Operating systems that align more closely with specific hypervisors
• Applications that are certified to run only on specific hypervisors
• Hypervisor licensing models with dramatically different cost structures and models
• Data center consolidations
• Hybrid cloud adoptions

VKernel is committed to supporting multiple hypervisors and other virtualization platforms such as public cloud offerings in a manner that is completely transparent to virtualization administrators. Today’s announcement of collaboration with Red Hat and plans to support Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization adds to previously announced support for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. Support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is expected to be available in late 2011.

In addition to supporting Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, VKernel is also joining the Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA). The OVA is a consortium of companies committed to fostering the adoption of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). Created and governed by Red Hat, IBM, HP, and Intel, the OVA is designed to promote examples of customer successes, encourage interoperability, and accelerate the expansion of the ecosystem of third party solutions around KVM.

“We are very pleased to welcome VKernel into the Open Virtualization Alliance,” said Navin Thadani, Senior Director, Virtualization Business at Red Hat. “KVM is gaining traction in the marketplace and capacity and performance management are becoming increasingly critical components to effectively managing enterprise virtualization and cloud environments. As use of KVM and products based on it, such as our Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, continue to grow in the marketplace, customers require advanced management solutions to help them increase VM densities while maintaining application performance.”

“Given the continued proliferation of virtualization and the evolving dynamics around pricing and licensing, we are seeing a dramatic increase in customer interest in multi-hypervisor environments and a specific interest in Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization,” said Doug McNary, CEO of VKernel.

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

Andover, Massachusetts, USA, August 9, 2011 — VKernel, the award-winning provider of enterprise-class performance and capacity management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, today announced an essential resource to assist virtualization administrators and data center managers in capacity planning. The new white paper, “Detecting Available VM Slots for Capacity Planning,” describes how to use VM performance metrics for memory, CPU, storage I/O, storage space and network capacity to determine counts for how many more VMs can safely fit within the existing virtualized infrastructure. This white paper comes on the heels of recent VMware announcements concerning licensing changes for vSphere 5, whereby licensing will be determined by pooled vRAM allocations. This pricing shift makes capacity planning, especially for VM memory resources, ever more important to determine adequate hardware and vSphere licensing needs. For further assistance in capacity planning, VKernel’s vOPS™ Capacity Manager can automatically calculate available VM slots and model capacity impacts in multiple “what-if” scenarios.

Capacity planning is a challenging and time-consuming endeavor for many data centers. Virtualized environments produce massive amounts of VM performance data that must be analyzed to derive precise VM slot availability results. Additionally, as environments are dynamic and constantly changing, these results must be updated repeatedly. The complexity and significant time commitment in capacity planning for virtual environments leads many data centers to employ a trial and error approach when creating new VMs. Yet, precise capacity planning results are essential to avoid performance degradation caused by VMs deployed in resource constrained infrastructures and to ensure that sufficient capacity remains available for expected environment growth.

VKernel’s new white paper, “Detecting Available VM Slots for Capacity Planning,” adds structure and instruction for the capacity planning process in order to eliminate a measure of complexity. This paper explains which VM metrics must be assessed, and how they should be used in calculations to derive precise counts of how many more VMs can safely fit in both HA and non-HA enabled infrastructures. For virtualization administrators that want to put the concepts described in the white paper into action, VKernel vOPS Capacity Manager automatically calculates these results on a real-time basis and can factor in scenarios for multiple VM deployments.

“With VMware’s shift towards a vRAM-based licensing structure for vSphere 5, adding precision to capacity planning and resource sizing decisions will become increasingly more important for many customers,” said Bryan Semple, Chief Marketing Officer at VKernel. “This new white paper lays out a metrics-based approach that virtualized data center administrators can use to gain more precise capacity planning results.”

VKernel’s “Detecting Available VM Slots for Capacity Planning” white paper is available at http://www.vkernel.com/resources/whitepapers/vm-slots-for-capacity-planning. A free 30-day trial of vOPS Capacity Manager - which automates capacity planning by forecasting and managing virtual environment capacity - can be downloaded from http://www.vkernel.com/products/capacity-manager/overview.

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

Andover, Massachusetts, USA, July 27, 2011 — VKernel, the award-winning provider of enterprise-class performance and capacity management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, announced today a key resource to assist VMware customers in determining proper vRAM (VM memory) sizing. Outlined in a new white paper, “VM Memory (vRAM) Sizing Considerations,” by vExpert David Davis of VMwareVideos.com, virtualization administrators can learn how to use VMware memory metrics to determine the proper vRAM allocation for a virtual machine. This new white paper comes on the heels of VMware’s recently announced licensing change for vSphere 5, whereby licensing is determined by pooled vRAM allocations. This VMware licensing shift makes proper vRAM sizing essential for many customers to avoid purchasing additional vSphere licenses. For further assistance in VM memory sizing, VKernel's vOPS™ Optimizer can calculate proper vRAM allocations using methods similar to those explained in this white paper, and can automatically implement these VM memory sizing changes. 

Memory is typically the most constrained computing resource in a virtualized data center. Determining how much memory to allocate for a VM can be complicated as a variety of VM performance metrics must be analyzed, some vCenter settings can vastly affect how VM memory responds, and different memory usage results are reported at the guest and hypervisor level. Yet, determining an accurate virtual memory allocation is critical as setting too little vRAM can impact application performance and allocating too much will increase costs. 

VKernel’s new white paper, “VM Memory (vRAM) Sizing Considerations,” explains which VMware metrics must be analyzed, how to interpret the results, and outlines a vRAM sizing process for both new and existing VMs. For virtualization administrators that want to put the concepts described in the white paper into action, VKernel vOPS Optimizer automatically analyzes the metrics described in the white paper to determine proper VM memory sizing. 

“The new vRAM -based licensing structure for VMware’s vSphere 5 makes capacity management for virtual memory more important for many customers,” said Bryan Semple, Chief Marketing Officer at VKernel. “VMware administrators will need to minimize vRAM over allocation to increase the number of 

VMs they can put on a physical server for a given vSphere license cost. This new white paper instructs VM administrators on how to undertake this vRAM sizing process.” 

VKernel’s “VM Memory (vRAM) Sizing Considerations” white paper is available at http://www.vkernel.com/resources/whitepapers/vm-memory-vram-sizing-considerations. A free 30-day trial of vOPS Optimizer—which analyzes actual virtual machine utilization and VM performance metrics to properly size VM resource allocations—can be downloaded from http://www.vkernel.com/products/optimizer/overview.

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

Andover, Massachusetts, USA, July 27, 2011 — VKernel, the award-winning provider of enterprise-class performance and capacity management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, announced today another record quarter. The continued revenue growth, delivery of new products to market, emergence of new cloud customers, and adoption of VMware performance and capacity management solutions among medium to large enterprises has driven this growth.

Paramount to VKernel’s Q2 success was the growing importance of both public and private cloud deployments. In addition to the challenges faced by IT departments deploying virtualization technology, clouds must cope with the added complexities of highly variable demand, chargeback, and competition from other service providers. For cloud environments that utilize customer self-service portals, unpredictable usage spikes can be especially problematic. To achieve success, advanced virtual environments and cloud deployments must provide performance, capacity and cost visibility to a diverse group of internal and external stakeholders on a real-time basis. Capacity management and performance monitoring for these deployments is fast becoming the foundation for success.

One of VKernel’s new Q2 cloud customers was Peak 10, a leading cloud and managed services provider. Peak 10 deployed the VKernel vOperations Suite to manage its virtualized infrastructure. According to Frank Shepherd, Infrastructure Engineer at Peak 10, “We see a lot of potential for streamlining virtualization management operations with the help of VKernel. Integrating VKernel’s capacity management and performance data solutions would not only help our data centers become more efficient, but could also allow us to enhance service offerings that will add further support for our customers.”

Highlights of VKernel’s quarter include:

• Record Financial Results – Nearly 3x year over year revenue growth driven by continued growth and adoption of VMware performance and capacity management solutions.
• New Products – VKernel launched a new version of its award-winning vOperations Suite^TM 3.5,  designed to meet the needs of hosting firms, private cloud implementations, and organizations deploying advanced virtualized environments.
• Award Accolades – Datamation Magazine listed VKernel as a cloud computing “Up and Comer” addressing the critical, but often overlooked problem of capacity management for the virtualized environments that power many of the private and public clouds.
• Global Expansion – Partnered with Macnica Networks to distribute VKernel’s solutions into the Japanese market, accelerating VKernel’s efforts to create a more global footprint of its operations.
• New Markets – Expanded support to provide the fast-growing Microsoft Hyper-V user base with robust performance monitoring, capacity planning, and chargeback capabilities needed to successfully manage applications in virtualized environments.
• Customer Milestone – VKernel vOperations Suite is now used by over 25% of the Fortune 20.

“Second quarter revenue exceeded our expectations,” said Doug McNary, CEO of VKernel. “We are committed to delivering to our growing list of cloud providers and advanced virtualization enterprises the solutions they need to maximize ROI of their VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V environments. With the industry’s only integrated suite of products for performance monitoring, capacity management, optimization and chargeback, VKernel is well positioned to accelerate our growth through the balance of the year.”

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

Andover, Massachusetts, USA, July 13, 2011 — VKernel, the award-winning provider of enterprise class performance and capacity management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, announced today a new online resource for VMware customers looking to understand new VMware vSphere 5 vRAM pricing.

VMware’s announcement yesterday changed the licensing strategy for vSphere 5. The new pricing model means that vSphere will be sold based on total virtual RAM allocated to virtual machines in an environment. This consumption based model has consequences for virtual environments that ...

• ... operate with high density core and memory servers
• ... over-allocate memory either at the host level or on a per-VM basis
• ... are facing hardware refreshes with next generation server technology

The consequences for VMware’s customers will be:

1. Price increases for some
2. A greater focus on minimizing vRAM usage for all
3. A renewed focus on chargeback

In particular, vRAM sizing will likely become a high priority for many data centers when the new pricing structure is implemented. Customers that have over-allocated vRAM for their VMs or have over allocated vRAM at the host level could find themselves with a price increase for VMware licenses relative to the memory that their environment’s VMs truly require. VKernel’s award-winning vOPS™ Optimizer product will detect the actual vRAM requirements for each VM and enable automated sizing implementation to ensure that VMs use the minimum amount of memory needed to maintain high performance.

VKernel has assembled the following resources for VMware customers to assist with this transition:

• Online analysis detailing the impact on customer environments
• A new white paper titled vRAM Sizing Considerations coauthored by noted vExpert David Davis
• 30 Day Trial of vOPS Optimizer to reduce vRAM allocation and save customers vSphere licensing costs
• A free tool, CapacityVIEW,  for rapid assessment of the number of VMs with over committed vRAM in an environment

“VMware’s vRAM pricing model will cause customers to focus more closely on effective memory usage,” says Bryan Semple, Chief Marketing Officer, VKernel. “VMware customers need to quickly understand if they can reduce vRAM usage in a safe manner to reduce licensing costs. VKernel can help drawing on our years of experience in capacity management focused on optimizing CPU, storage and memory resources.“

Vkernel’s online resource guide can be found at www.vkernel.com/vram.

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

Los Angeles, California and Andover, Massachusetts, USA, July 12, 2011 — VKernel, the award-winning provider of enterprise class performance and capacity management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, announced today announced today at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2011, general availability of the new VKernel vOPS™ API. The API allows virtualized data centers to integrate the capacity intelligence generated by VKernel’s Capacity Analytics Engine™ into external systems such as help desks, ticketing systems, billing applications, self-service portals, reporting frameworks and systems management consoles. Supporting the API is VKernel’s new Capacity.LINK developer program, also announced today.

Performance and capacity intelligence data is critical for multiple workflows during VM provisioning, deployment, maintenance and retirement for both cloud operators and internal IT environments. Access to this data by the various IT systems performing these workflows is necessary to enable any level of cross-system automation. Sample use cases that can take advantage of capacity intelligence data include:

• Adding resource usage statistics to finance systems for automated billing.
• Providing capacity bottleneck information to ticketing and application performance monitoring systems for troubleshooting application performance problems.
• Validating available capacity to support self-service deployment portals.
• Reserving future capacity to support IT orchestration engines.
• Supporting executive management with capacity trending and utilization information inserted into IT dashboards.

The new vOPS API is designed to support these use cases by providing both third party and internally built applications with capacity intelligence information. Delivered as a REST-based application, the vOPS API gives web services access to all VKernel data such as:

• VM performance issue root cause diagnosis, impact analysis and remediation steps
• Available VM slot counts for particular application types
• Capacity reservations for future VM deployments
• Billable amounts for IT resource usage and allocations
• VM sizing recommendations for memory, CPU, and storage
• Abandoned VMDKs, templates, snapshots, powered-Off VMs and Zombie VMs

“We see a lot of potential for streamlining virtualization management operations with the VKernel vOPS API,” says Frank Shepherd, Infrastructure Engineer at Peak 10, a leading cloud and managed services provider. “Integrating VKernel’s capacity management and performance data would not only help our data centers become more efficient, but could also allow us to enhance service offerings that will add further support for our customers.”

In addition to announcing the availability of vOPS API, VKernel also announced today its new Capacity.LINK developers program.  Designed to support customers and partners implementing VKernel data integration initiatives, Capacity.LINK allows customers and partners to join the program for access to the API, documentation and support.

“Windows Server Hyper-V customers will benefit from gathering the capacity management data that VKernel’s new vOPS API provides,” said Mike Schutz, Senior Director of windows Server Marketing at Microsoft Corporation. “The vOPS API and VKernel’s support through the Capacity.LINK program make it easy to integrate and access additional capacity management data with Microsoft’s System Center management suite.”

“Capacity management is critical for large scale virtualized environments and private cloud infrastructure as a service,” said Alessandro Perilli, Research Director, Gartner. “As the virtualized data center grows, integration between capacity management and existing enterprise systems such as provisioning, ticketing, billing and reporting is fundamental to maintain the efficiency improvements gained through virtualization.”

General Availability
The vOPS API is packaged within the VKernel vOperations Suite™ 3.5 which is available for a 30-day trial from www.vkernel.com. Pricing starts at $299 per socket per application. The Capacity.LINK program is available for all VKernel partners and customers. Partner enrollment is available at http://www.vkernel.com/partners. VKernel will showcase the vOPS API at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference Booth #1222, July 10-14, Los Angeles, CA.

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

Andover, Massachusetts, USA, June 13, 2011 — VKernel, the award-winning provider of enterprise class performance and capacity management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, announced today a partnership with Macnica Networks to distribute VKernel’s solutions into the Japanese market. This announcement marks the acceleration of VKernel’s efforts to create a more global footprint to its operations.

Macnica Inc. had been established in Japan in 1972, and Macnica Networks Corp. became independent subsidiary in 2004. Macnica Networks is a renowned software and technology company that has excellent links and established relationships within Japanese IT industries. Under the terms of the agreement, Macnica Networks will distribute VKernel’s entire suite of products through its network of reseller partners. Additionally, Macnica Networks will translate VKernel’s products and documentation into Japanese as well as provide pre-sales and post-sales support to its partners and customers. 

“Partnering with Macnica Networks is a perfect fit for VKernel, as Macnica Networks has the right connections and expertise to drive VKernel’s business in Japan,” said Doug McNary, CEO of VKernel. “Macnica Networks’ long experience in the Japanese market, broad set of reseller partners, and expertise in the virtualization space makes them an ideal partner for VKernel.”

“VKernel’s unique technology solutions are a great addition to Macnica Networks’s portfolio,” said Mr, Masahiro Miyabukuro, President at Macnica Networks. “With the emergence of virtualization and cloud environments among Japanese businesses today, VKernel offers the broad set of features combined with the rapid time to value and affordable cost that our partners and customers require.”

Please visit http://www.macnica.net/vkernel/ for more information.

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.

About Macnica Networks
Macnica Networks Corp. has over 20 years of experience in product localization, sales, and substantial technical support of computer network equipment. Macnica Networks supplies a full line of leading network appliances, software, telecom and storage solutions to its customers and consistently brings innovative new products to their portfolio. Macnica Networks provides a high level of comprehensive technical support and educational programs to assist their customers with their applications. For more information about Macnica Networks, visit www.macnica.net.

VKernel and the VKernel logo are trademarks of VKernel Corporation. All other company and product names mentioned may be trademarks of their respective holders.

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

Andover, Massachusetts, USA, June 07, 2011 — VKernel, the award-winning provider of enterprise class performance and capacity management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, announced today at Cloud Computing Expo 2011, general availability of the vOperations Suite™ 3.5 (also referred to as vOPS™ 3.5). This release addresses new requirements identified from over 700 VKernel customers, including a number of private cloud and hosting providers. Product features include new VM slot reservations, enhanced capacity modeling, extensible customer reporting, and additional performance measurement capabilities -- all designed to meet the needs of hosting firms, private cloud implementations, and organizations deploying advanced virtualized environments. VKernel will showcase vOPS 3.5 at Cloud Computing Expo Booth #239, June 6-9, New York City.

Capacity Drives Performance in Virtualized Environments
IT managers looking to scale virtualized data centers and cloud environments face difficulties ensuring capacity and performance as their infrastructure grows. Demand for new virtual machines combined with growth of existing VMs make it challenging to anticipate capacity demand. For cloud environments that utilize customer self-service portals, unpredictable usage spikes can be especially problematic. Finally, advanced virtual environments and cloud deployments must provide performance, capacity and cost visibility to a diverse group of internal and external stakeholders on a real time basis. VKernel’s vOPS 3.5 addresses these issues with enhanced capacity planning, performance monitoring, and reporting packaged in a simple to download, easy to deploy, fast time to results application suite.

Enhanced Capacity Planning
vOPS 3.5 adds advanced modeling and VM slot reservations to its already market leading capacity planning capabilities. First, vOPS 3.5 makes modeling what-if scenarios for future VM deployments accurate, quick and easy. vOPS 3.5 now has the ability to quickly clone an existing virtual machines past usage characteristics for use in future capacity models. These cloned VM load signatures can be combined with an unlimited number of other VM resource sizes to accomplish sophisticated ―what-if‖ scenarios. 

Second, vOPS 3.5 now supports VM slot reservations. VM slot reservations enable virtualization administrators to claim capacity in the present for virtual machines scheduled to be deployed in the future. Once capacity is reserved for a future VM deployment, this capacity is removed from available VM slot calculations providing virtualization administrators with an accurate view of truly available VM slots. 

Specifically, vOPS 3.5 introduces: 

• Reserved VM Slots -- VMs that will be deployed can have slots reserved so that their resource needs are removed from further modeling. Alerting and reconciliation abilities are included. 
• Multi-VM Capacity Modeling -- Multiple VMs of different types can be modeled sequentially to assess impacts to available VM slots. Models can be converted into reserved VMs. 

New Full Cycle Report Generation
Private clouds, hosting services and advanced virtualized environments have complex reporting requirements that involve getting the right information out to stakeholders in a secure and automated fashion. These stakeholders include management, application owners and customers. vOPS 3.5 introduces advanced VM density reporting, capacity trending and utilization reports in addition to advanced functionality that supports secure integration into customer web portals or external management dashboards such as Microsoft SharePoint. Specifically, vOPS 3.5 now features: 

• Web-based Report Access – Custom URLs can be generated which can be embedded into web-based applications with permissions-based access based on Business Views. 
• Advanced Customer Reports - New reports that can be configured by Business View show resource usage, VM density, VM creation, and VM activity with customizable time frames. 

Increased Storage and Network Visibility for Enhanced VM Performance Troubleshooting
As clouds and virtualized environments become larger and more complex, so too do the infrastructure areas that connect to the servers and are often managed by separate teams. In particular, storage and network areas can be the source of VM performance issues. vOPS 3.5 builds on existing visibility into disk throughput, storage latency, and network usage with newly collected performance metrics. Available now within vOPS 3.5: 

• Enhanced Datastore and VM-Level Latency and Disk Throughput Visibility – vOPS 3.5 now calculates overall latency, IOPS, and throughput for each datastore and VM. This provides visibility within storage infrastructure to identify performance issues. 
• Alerting and graphing of network metrics – vOPS 3.5 now collects network traffic and dropped traffic information for both VMs and hosts from the network. Changes in these metrics are easily viewable and can be set to trigger alarms. 

Peer 1 Hosting, one of the world’s leading IT hosting providers uses VKernel vOperations Suite to manage its large and growing virtualized environment. "The enhanced performance monitoring, reporting and new capacity modeling capabilities in vOPS 3.5 will help streamline various management functions in our data center," says Chris DiGanci, IT Manager at PEER 1 Hosting. "The new capacity planning features will allow our staff to quickly assess the capacity impacts of deploying additional VMs in our environment."

"The new features in VKernel’s latest release address some important management gaps that rapidly-scaling virtualized environments and cloud deployments are certainly facing,‖ said Dave Bartoletti, Senior Analyst, The Taneja Group. "With automated performance reports for customers and other stakeholders, by continuously assessing the impact of growth on available capacity, and through remediation recommendations for VM performance issues, the vOperations Suite should ease the burden on virtualization administrators faced with optimizing the performance of their growing, mission-critical virtual environments."

"VKernel is continuing its blistering pace of innovation in capacity management," said Bryan Semple, Chief Marketing Officer, VKernel. "We are constantly being challenged by our growing customer base to provide more sophisticated analytics, yet deliver the results in an actionable way for a systems administrator. vOPS 3.5 contains many key enhancements that our growing list of cloud providers and advanced virtualization enterprises have requested."

General Availability
VKernel vOperations Suite 3.5 is available now for a 30-day trial from www.vkernel.com. 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