After the successful release of the Capacity Management suite product at VMworld , its all been pretty quiet on the VKernel front , which usually means they are up to something.In addition to coding away like the clever chaps they are , they’ve also been growing the company , always a handy thing to do if you’d like to put food on the table.Its been a bumper year and a record quarter for them with the key Metric of their client sizes continuing to grow, showing that people are taking the problem of optimisation planning & chargeback seriously. When I was invited onto a call with Bryan Semple , CMO for VKernel last week I was looking forward to something new. Little did I know that I’d actually seen a sneak peak of it back in July with the Chargeback 2.0 release.
One of the key features within the new versions of the chargeback product is that is supports chargeback for environments running on Microsoft’s Hyper-V platform , and specifically the support for the Virtual Machine Manager Self Service Portal Toolkit (MSVMMSSP) . This allow the creation of self service portals to not only provision Machines according to a quote , but to be able to collect metrics for static or utilisation based chargeback of those machines. This starts to become increasingly relevant as enterprises move towards a “cloud” model ( presumably private with hyper-v at the moment ) VKernel has been selected as the primary chargeback vendor. Other partners providing support for the toolkit include IBM , Dell , EMC NetApp and HP
Ok so I almost went two paragraphs without using the “C” word – I could have been a lot worse! When looking at the kind of product that VKernel offers from a cloud provider perspective , the importance of the 3 sub products ( Capacity Analysis , Optimisation & Chargeback ) gets juggled around a bit. A service provider doesn’t really care as much about VM rightsizing as the end users are going to pay for it. A public cloud is also going to be looking at capacity from a slightly different point of view so while its important , I would imagine they may well use a different toolset.
VKernel has integrated with Microsoft’s “cloud” product , but what will it do with VMware other than the existing integrations , I would suspect they are keeping a very careful eye on the vCloud Director API and how they can best plug into that for example to track the costs of a vApp in a hybrid cloud situation as it moves from the private to public datacenter.