VKernel Discusses Capacity Management Solutions for Virtualized Environments

TMC CEO Rich Tehrani (News - Alert) recently got the chance to speak to Bryan Semple, CMO of VKernel Corp., about the company's capacity management solutions for virtualized environments. The interview took place at Cloud Expo 2011 in New York City.

VKernel provides virtualization performance and capacity management products to assist virtual system administrators with reducing the costs of virtualization, as well as to optimize their VM performance.

"It used to be that we would take a single application and put it on a hardware server and it would forever live there," said Semple. He explained that virtualization enables multiple applications to be put on a single server, which is great since it increases efficiency. But it also brings about many challenges as multiple VMs compete for processing memory and storage.

Semple added that VKernel's solutions enable capacity management within that complex environment, for better control over both performance and cost. "The challenge is to make sense of that data in an automated fashion, so that the virtualization administrators can take action based on that data," he said.

The company's VKernel vOperations Suite (vOPS) is essentially a dashboard that enables analytics and performance analysis of a virtualized environment. It uses predictive and real-time analysis to simplify monitoring, capacity planning, reporting, chargeback and optimization of virtual environments. The vOPS features a unique Capacity Analytics Engine that delivers recommendations and offers easy implementation, scalability and a quick time to value. The suite is installed as a single agent-less virtual appliance and offers a centralized control panel for virtualization management tasks.

Semple said there are a number of compelling usage cases for the vOPS solution. Primarily, the solution alerts administrators that their VMs are running fine from a performance standpoint and not competing with each other for memory. It can also predict when a VM will run out of capacity within that environment, and offer recommendations on where to place the next VM as the environment is scaled out.

Another compelling benefit of the solution is optimization, added Semple. Applications are often allocated huge amounts of memory, storage and CPU power, and these resources are sometimes over allocated. Capacity analysis enables resources to be reclaimed and used more efficiently. Finally, the vOPS solution offers reporting and charts so that management may understand the operating costs of their environments as well as which applications are consuming which resources.

Semple said vKernel customers are typically running 50 to 100 VMs on the low end, all the way up to 10,000 VMs. He said that as the number of VMs increases, organizations cannot use basic monitoring tools to figure out how resources are being allocated, and must have a solution installed on the back end to continuously analyze and flesh out the data. He added that service providers can build the solution directly into their specifications when designing a project, to help keep capital costs under control.

"As people are moving to more sophisticated VM deployments, they're bringing more mission critical applications online, and ensuring capacity for those is absolutely critical," said Semple. Not only that, but adhering to licensing restrictions for multiple applications is also a factor, as Semple found out in speaking to a prospective customer at the Cloud Expo. The customer's company came close to having a multi-million-dollar problem with Microsoft (News - Alert) because of the way their VMs were deployed, said Semple.

The company recently announced version 3.5 of the vOPS suite, addressing a number of requirements as identified by more than 700 of its customers, including private cloud and hosting providers. Features include new VM slot reservations, enhanced capacity modeling, extensible customer reporting and added performance measurement capabilities. The new features are all designed specifically to meet the needs of hosting firms, private cloud implementations and organizations deploying advanced virtualized environments.

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