Among the usual flood of pre-VMWorld announcements was an unusually understandable and to-the-point briefing from VKernel. Its pitch: making it simple and inexpensive (or at least simpler and less expensive) to create more VMs on a given set of physical servers.
The basic problem, says Vice President of Product Management and Marketing Kevin Conklin, is that while VMware claims customers should be able to run 10-12 virtual machines on each physical server, most are stuck at 5-7 VMs because they can’t see well enough into the virtual infrastructure to determine which processors or physical servers have the processor, memory or storage capacity to handle more VMs. That’s where VKernel comes in, a one year old company with $7 million in funding and about 200 customers, comes in.
Its Capacity Analyzer virtual appliance creates reports (click on the image below for a larger view)
that even I could understand showing the best places to create new VMs and how
to eliminate or avoid bottlenecks with existing VMs. “We’re maniacally focused,”
says Conklin, “on providing you with an answer, in an actionable format, so you
can actually fix something with this product.”
This week VKernel introduced an Optimization Pack that features three new applets that not only show you which VMs are overloaded and which are unused and can be culled, but let you single-click to ease the processor and memory bottlenecks. While it can find wasted storage or storage-related bottlenecks, CA can’t yet go in and fix those problems. Not only does it take more work to integrate CA with storage vendors’ APIs, but most storage admins fight tooth and nail against anyone messin’ with their volumes.
Even so, VKernel claims some customers at getting instant return on investment just by using CA to find and then manually delete unused VMs, often saving (it claims) 10 to 20% of a customer’s overall storage. That's an approach even a CFO can love in the downturn – especially given VKernel’s pricing, which it claims is a third to a fifth of competing products.
Comments