VKernel Launches vOperations Suite 3.5

The company's vOPS 3.5 adds advanced modeling and VM slot reservations to its capacity planning capabilities.

Virtualized data center and cloud environment performance and capacity management specialist VKernel has launched vOperations Suite 3.5, which addresses new requirements identified from more than 700 VKernel customers, including private cloud and hosting providers. Product features include virtual machine slot reservations, enhanced capacity modeling, extensible customer reporting and additional performance measurement capabilities.

vOperations Suite 3.5, or vOPS 3.5, adds advanced modeling and VM slot reservations to its capacity planning capabilities. First, vOPS 3.5 makes modeling what-if scenarios for future VM deployments easy and accurate. vOPS 3.5 now has the ability to clone an existing virtual machine's past usage characteristics for use in future capacity models. These cloned VM load signatures can be combined with an unlimited number of other VM resource sizes to accomplish what-if scenarios.

Second, vOPS 3.5 now supports VM slot reservations. VM slot reservations enable virtualization administrators to claim capacity in the present for virtual machines scheduled to be deployed in the future. Once capacity is reserved for a future VM deployment, this capacity is removed from available VM slot calculations, providing virtualization administrators with a view of truly available VM slots. The platform is available for a 30-day trial from the company's Website, and pricing starts at $299 per socket per application.

VMs that will be deployed can have slots reserved so that their resource needs are removed from further modeling. Alerting and reconciliation abilities are included, and multiple VMs of different types can be modeled sequentially to assess impacts to available VM slots. Models can be converted into reserved VMs.

"The new features in VKernel's latest release address some important management gaps that rapidly scaling virtualized environments and cloud deployments are certainly facing," said Dave Bartoletti, senior analyst with The Taneja Group. "With automated performance reports for customers and other stakeholders, by continuously assessing the impact of growth on available capacity, and through remediation recommendations for VM performance issues, the vOperations Suite should ease the burden on virtualization administrators faced with optimizing the performance of their growing, mission-critical virtual environments."

The platform also introduces advanced VM density reporting, capacity trending and utilization reports in addition to advanced functionality that supports secure integration into customer Web portals or external management dashboards such as Microsoft SharePoint. Specifically, vOPS 3.5 now features Web-based report access, where custom URLs can be generated and embedded into Web-based applications with permissions-based access based on Business Views, and advanced customer reports that can be configured by Business View to show resource usage, VM density, VM creation and VM activity with customizable time frames.

Peer 1 Hosting, an IT hosting provider, uses VKernel vOperations Suite to manage its virtualized environment. "The enhanced performance monitoring, reporting and new capacity modeling capabilities in vOPS 3.5 will help streamline various management functions in our data center," says Chris DiGanci, IT manager at Peer 1 Hosting. "The new capacity planning features will allow our staff to quickly assess the capacity impacts of deploying additional VMs in our environment."