VKernel, provider of Capacity Management products for virtualized data centers, has announced the general availability of VKernel Capacity Management Suite 2.0 (CMS 2.0).
VKernel CMS integrates previously separate products from VKernel with additional capabilities to create the most powerful integrated suite for capacity monitoring, planning, optimization and chargeback for enterprise environments.
Tapping into capacity management experience with over 500 customers including Global 2000 organizations, CMS 2.0 contains significant improvements in scalability, analytics, and automation while still providing a simple to download, simple to deploy, fast time to results application suite.
From a pure performance standpoint, CMS now scales to support the federation of multiple vCenters. In addition, by integrating previously separate products onto a single appliance, CMS reduces the load on connected vCenters by over 60%.
But scalability encompasses more than technological performance. As the number of VMs analyzed by an application increases in scale, the application must maintain its original usability despite the added complexity of more data, more users, and more analytical complexity. CMS contains multiple improvements to enable scalable operations as both the number of VMs and users within a company increase.
In addition to scalability improvements, CMS 2.0 contains improvements to the core capacity analytics engine. These improvements include the usage of storage throughput data in capacity calculations, support for thin provisioning, customizable virtual machine models for space availability calculations, selectable memory metrics, and new capacity change history analysis. The addition of these calculations to the capacity analytics engine provides system administrators with:
- More accurate capacity planning that includes storage throughput
- Awareness of over commitment caused by thin provisioning usage
- Capacity planning forecasts based on application specific VM sizes, not a default, one size fits all model
- Memory usage modeling customized for particular application characteristics
- The ability to compare specific VM parameters to determine what has changed or will change over a given time period
Finally, CMS 2.0 contains new automation capabilities. As the number of VMs scale into the hundreds, organizations find it increasingly difficult to regularly evaluate and correct resource allocations for virtual machines. CMS has the ability to selectively reclaim unused resources at the push of a button or on a predetermined schedule.
Reclamation rules can be applied to further restrict which resources are automatically reclaimed. Only through this selective automation approach can organizations realistically improve ROI on a large scale. And only through this automation can VM system administrators gain additional time in their day.
In addition to improvements in scalability, analytics, and automation, CMS 2.0 contains a new product offering: VKernel Inventory 1.0. Inventory indexes all VMs in an environment and allows system administrator to sort, filter, and view all information about a VM from a single pane. Installed as part of Capacity Management Suite, Inventory provides value within 20 minutes from download by automatically indexing all VMs in an environment, serving as the historical record of VM configurations, allowing a single point of reference for all information about a VM and providing robust on-the-fly reporting abilities.
VKernel Capacity Management Suite 2.0 is available immediately for purchase or free 30 day trial. Products integrated into the suite include Capacity Analyzer 5.0, Optimization Pack 2.0, Chargeback 2.0, and Inventory 2.0.
Pricing starts at $299 per socket.