Tag Archive: cloud


 

Never being a company to stagnate when it comes to releases , VKernel are continuing to develop their product set around capacity management and infrastructure optimisation for virtualised environments. After a strong quarter that has seen record numbers , expanded support for alternate Hypervisors such as Hyper-V & a new product aimed at the real time monitoring end of the capacity management spectrum ( vOPS Performance Analyzer )

The 3.5 release of the main VKernel vOperations Suite , to give it its full name is now “with added cloud”. I’m so glad the product marketing guys did NOT say that – in fact quite the opposite. The product had taken on features as suggested by its service provider & customers who are already down the path towards a private cloud.

vOPS 3.5 adds features which may make the life of an admin in such an environment easier – more often then not they are becoming the caretaker of an environment as workloads are generated via self service portals and on demand by applications. Being able to model different scenarios based on a real life workload is key to ensure your platform can meet its availability & performance SLA’s. Metrics in an environment mean nothing if you are unable to report on then, and this has been address with the implementation of a much improved reporting module within the product , which allows a much more granular permissions structure & the ability to export reports into other portals.

The capacity modeller component now allows “VM’s as a reservation” – knowing that not all workloads are equal means that you need to model the addition of workloads of differing size into an environment. These model VM’s can be based on a real CPU/MEM/IO workload.

The last key improvement is yet more metrics – this time around Datastore & VM performance including IOPS. Having been through an exercise where I had to manually collect IOPS data for an environment , I can personally attest to the value of automating this! When I was an end user of the vOPS product it was a metric I was constantly bugging the product development guys for – looks like they listened !

 

For more information, head over to the VKernel website.

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Details have just been released for the next meeting of the London VMware User Group – In the few years since  I have started attending , this event has continually got better and better with May’s meeting blossoming into a full days event with a couple of different tracks and 2 labs hosted by COLT , based around consumption of resources with vCould Director & Administering vCloud director. If these labs are up to the quality of those offered at VMworld Europe then it’ll be worth taking the day off just for those !

Did I mention this was all free ? After the glow of the projector bulb has died town the event concludes with a social reception at a nearby pub to give you a chance to meet , greet and drink with fellow and like minded individuals who actually want to listen to you talk about virtualisation all night ( my usual drinking buddies tend to fall asleep after the first hour or so ! )

 

Head over to http://www.myvmug.org/e/in/eid=13 and register!  follow #LonVMUG on twitter for updates and tweets from other attendee’s

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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.