The Need for a Capacity Manager

In this latest article in Computerworld, "Hot Jobs: Capacity Manager," it states that many organizations are looking to add a capacity manager to make sure the right amount of IT resources support the business and that the IT infrastructure is fully optimized. Virtualization is the primary driver for this need as the dynamic nature of the virtual environment goes beyond traditional capacity planning.

"The rapid adoption of virtualization technology, the cloud computing trend and the pressure on CIOs to get the most return on investment from IT purchases have helped to make this a "hot job" in recent years."

With more and more of the data center becoming virtualized, the capacity planner and capacity manager positions are now increasingly more important. But in order to more effeciently do these jobs, automated tools that can help continually monitor and manage capacity and ongoing and changing resource utilization are a must. Even with dedicated people in place, manual processes of making sure there is the right balance of capacity to meet performance metrics and usage demands cannot keep up in the dynamic data center. The companies that will succeed with virtualization and achieve the ROIs that they desire will be the ones that best address capacity management with people, processes and tools.

VKernel Secure $7 Million in Round B Funding

Today, VKernel is announcing we have secured $7 million in Round B funding led by new investor Longworth Venture Partners and joined by existing investors Hummer Winblad and Polaris. The entire VKernel team is very excited about this latest round of funding as it validates the hard work and countless hours everybody has put in over the last year and half. To receive this level of funding in these economic times shows that top-tier investment firms believe in our company, our people, our products, and our overall direction.

Longworth posted a Blog entry, "Our investment in VKernel," on its site this morning that captures the essence of why they chose to invest in us.

Alex Bakman, founder and CEO of VKernel, offers this statement about why VKernel is different from the other virtualization management vendors and what the funding means to the company.

"From the start, VKernel made the decision to take a different approach to this market using a high velocity sales and marketing strategy to offer low-cost, simple-to-use products that deliver instant value,” said Bakman. “As a result, we are quickly becoming a ‘go-to’ company for organizations wanting to optimize their virtual data center investments. This latest round of funding is validation of our strategy and our success to date.”

To learn more about VKernel and how we can continually help you optimize your virtual data center, visit www.vkernel.com.

Finding the Root Cause of VMware Capacity Bottlenecks

With the initial release of our Capacity Analyzer about this time last year, we were helping our users get visibility into their resource utilization to better manage and optimize their CPU, memory, and storage capacity. The feedback we have received has been very positive. Over time, the biggest request we continued to hear was ‘can you show me where bottleneck problems are occurring and how can I quickly fix them before performance is drastically impacted?’

Yesterday, we released Capacity Analyzer 4.0 to our internal sales and marketing database. The public press announcement is planned for 4/28. This latest version is a major upgrade that you can download now. With Capacity Analyzer 4.0, we are now showing you the root cause of your capacity issues, where they are occurring, and providing suggested recommendations on how to quickly resolve them.

With deep drill down capabilities and advanced predictive analytics, Capacity Analyzer 4.0 helps users:

• Find an average of 20% or more capacity in your existing VMware ESX data center by right sizing VMs and removing bottlenecks
• Predict problems, set alerts, and proactively monitor performance and capacity
• Save time, reduce costs, and relieve the headache of trying to find where your bottlenecks are

All of the functionality that has made Capacity Analyzer extremely popular and valuable has been enhanced to provide even more detailed information. Here’s a sampling of some of the new enhancements:

• Peak usage analysis – see utilization peaks, averages, and when they occur
• More CPU statistics – usage, peak usage, CPU ready, CPU ready peak, I/O wait
• More memory statistics – usage, peak usage, swapped, swapped peak, balloon, balloon peak
• More disk/storage statistics – latency, latency peak, queue latency, queue latency peak, throughput, throughput peak, swap, swap peak, I/O wait, BUS resets, commands aborted
• Setting importance levels for VMs – resolution recommendations can be based on importance levels
• Role based access management for different types of users
• Filtering objects by name to find information faster

To see more, check out this quick overview and “how to use” video by Chris Chesley, a VKernel senior systems engineer. And, if you would like to try Capacity Analyzer 4.0 for free, you are welcome to download it today.

OVF 1.0 is Finalized

The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) recently released the first finished Open Virtualization Format version, OVF 1.0. We are excited about this because VKernel has been shipping its virtual server management products as virtual appliances using OVF from day one.

While we have had to educate the market about what OVF is, users of our software instantly see the benefits. Technology advances and virtualization in particular are designed to continually make things easier and more streamlined. The OVF format does exactly that by making virtual appliance deployment ever so simple and fast.

The news about OVF being finalized was quite sparse for such an interesting topic and technology. David Marshall covered it in this article, DMTF OVF Standard Reaches 1.0. And, Mark Bowker and Jon Oltsik at ESG had this to say, Why not more talk about Open Virtualization Format?

To see just how easy it is to deploy a virtual machine using OVF, we welcome you to try our products that will help you better manage your virtual infrastructure.