Product - Solution Mapping

Performance Monitoring

Monitoring a virtual environment is critical to maintaining performance and availability. Without adequate monitoring, VM performance problems can create havoc with applications. However, observing various metrics on graphs is not sufficient to avoid these problems. There are just too many VM system metrics within hosts, clusters, resource pools, VMs, network, and datastores to humanly monitor without some form of advanced analysis identifying issues within virtualized infrastructure. Performance Monitoring requires advanced analytics to keep VM environments operating without incident.  Learn more ...

Capacity Planning

Ensuring that sufficient capacity will be available in a virtual environment to support further VM growth and to maintain high performance is critical for virtualized data center operations. Because VM demand for resources is unpredictable, virtualization administrators must be able to access realistic assessments of available capacity in an environment, and model growth scenarios to determine procurement needs. Also, VMs left to their own operations will grow, requiring more resources, and can cause capacity bottlenecks that impact performance. Proper capacity planning is required to prevent bottlenecks, forecast capacity needs, and understand available VM slots. Learn more ...

Optimization and Rightsizing

Correctly sizing VM resource allocations is key to maintaining a high ROI for virtualized environments.  When VMs are provisioned, they are deployed using an estimated amount of CPU, memory and storage resources.  Over time, as the usage pattern for a VM is established or changes, it is typical to discover that many VMs were initially over provisioned. Additionally, VM management requires additional files creation such as snapshots for updates or templates. When these files are not deleted after their useful life ends, they take up costly storage unnecessarily. Optimization and rightsizing processes can help uncover which over allocated resources can be reclaimed for other VM's use. Learn more...

Reporting

While it is relatively easy to deploy virtual machines, gaining insights into a virtualized environment can be difficult and time consuming. Virtualization administrators often find themselves at a loss when management asks for high-level statistics such as VM counts and server consolidation density, or configuration information such as patch statistics and operating system image counts. Additionally, some of these insights must be shared with additional stakeholders such as customers and application owners.  Automated reporting with secure distribution to the appropriate stakeholders is a critical part of any virtualization endeavor. Learn more...

Chargeback and Cost Visibility

Hosting services providers, internal private cloud environments, and some advanced virtualization initiatives bill their customers for resource use with chargeback processes. Additionally, a key weapon to tame VM sprawl is the implementation of a cost visibility system to "showback" IT costs to appropriate business units. VKernel provides chargeback solutions for vSphere and Hyper-V environments to quickly and accurately allocate infrastructure costs by application and department. Learn more...

Storage I/O Visibility

Monitoring storage I/O capacity is critical for proper VM performance. Gaining visibility into this infrastructure area can be challenging as storage-level monitoring tools show disk perfomance but have difficulty in tracking which VMs caused storage I/O spikes. Furthermore, it is important to identify what specific actions within the VMs caused those events in order to resolve issues. Observing storage I/O at the VM level and identifying performance for each datastore is critical to maintaining a high-performing virtual environment. VKernel's storage I/O solutions help virtualization administrators ensure their VMs won't be impacted by storage I/O issues.

Cloud

Performance and capacity management for cloud providers is unique for the following reasons:

  • Performance monitoring is critical, not optional.
  • Chargeback is a requirement to prevent excessive operating costs. 
  • Capacity planning impacts return on assets. 
  • Tenant reporting is a must-have to fulfill SLA agreements. 
  • Finally, optimization becomes both a value add for end users and a way for service providers to run more efficiently. 

VKernel's cloud solutions meet the needs of service providers looking to deploy private or public clouds. Learn more...