VKernel expands performance, capacity management on Microsoft Hyper-V

Recently, VKernel announced expanded support for Microsoft Hyper-V, adding updates to its VKernel Capacity Analyzer and VKernel Chargeback products. Beyond that, VKernel said its latest announcement marks the company’s accelerating support for all things Microsoft. In addition to VKernel support for Hyper-V, the company’s products are also integrating with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) through Microsoft certified management packs, and the company stated it will continue to work with Microsoft to further extend SCOM capabilities to both Hyper-V and VMware environments.

VKernel told InfoWorld that Microsoft has been a great partner in regard to this latest round of joint development. VKernel worked closely with the Windows Server and Hyper-V groups, as well as the System Center group, all the while finding Microsoft development teams to be very open and available. The company also found Microsoft extremely helpful with coordinating marketing and release announcements to the larger user community and said it looked forward to seeing more virtualization-focused marketing activities and events from Microsoft in the future.

[ Also on InfoWorld.com: Find out why Veeam has added backup and replication support for Microsoft Hyper-V. | Read about how Microsoft Hyper-V now supports Linux-based CentOS. | Keep up-to-date on virtualization by signing up for InfoWorld’s Virtualization newsletter. ]

While VMware still owns the vast majority of the server virtualization market, VKernel believes that picture is starting to change. The company claims it’s seeing Hyper-V implementations beginning to grow quickly. Therefore, VKernel is working to release features to help make this infrastructure growth quick and easy.

“Hyper-V momentum in the virtualization market is increasing for a number of reasons,” said Alex Rosemblat, product marketing manager at VKernel. “One reason may stem from the fact that we have heard from customers for some time that they are wary of single sourcing their hypervisor, a mission-critical component for their infrastructure, from VMware. And VKernel released our first Hyper-V compatible product in 2009 to address this customer concern.”

Rosemblat continued, “A second reason may be due to the latest releases of Windows Server and System Center that clearly show Microsoft’s progress in developing enterprise virtualization solutions. And finally, VKernel’s decision to increase development for Hyper-V comes as a result of the growing interest we are witnessing for Hyper-V. This increasing awareness has manifested itself in a number of areas, from analyst reports that note the growing adoption of Hyper-V, to increasing downloads of Hyper-V compatible VKernel products, and also from meeting Hyper-V only virtualization administrators at VMware user group meetings.”

In terms of building the Hyper-V market, Rosemblat said he believes that VKernel can help accelerate Hyper-V adoption within a data center and across the industry through the confidence that his software provides scaling virtualization initiatives.

Dave Bartoletti, a senior analyst with the Taneja Group, seems to concur with VKernel’s assessment of Microsoft Hyper-V’s market movement. Bartoletti notes that virtualization ecosystem partners like VKernel are beefing up support for Hyper-V because of two main drivers: Customers are beginning to see Hyper-V as a mature (production-ready) hypervisor platform and are asking for multiplatform support, and the management ecosystem players need to differentiate their offerings from SCOM/SCVMM and the vCenter suite.

Bartoletti added, “Two years ago, it was Xen support everyone touted — I think the recent move to add value to Hyper-V signals that Microsoft is clearly making inroads as a production-ready and feature-rich platform.”

The latest releases of VKernel Capacity Analyzer with Hyper-V and VKernel Chargeback with Hyper-V were designed to provide virtualization administrators with enhanced performance monitoring, capacity planning, and chargeback capabilities for managing their virtual environments. Both applications can be deployed as virtual appliances on cluster shared volume (CSV)-enabled Hyper-V hosts. And both leverage VKernel’s patent-pending Capacity Analytics Engine in order to provide additional intelligence and added benefits above and beyond what the underlying hypervisor platform can supply.

VKernel’s Capacity Analyzer with Hyper-V provides:

• A visualizing heat map format for performance bottlenecks across the entire data center
• Root cause analysis and actionable recommendations to resolve performance issues
• Future resource issues and identifies the constraining resource
• Capacity planning and capacity management functionality to determine available VM slots

VKernel’s Chargeback with Hyper-V provides additional value by including:

• Allocated or actual cost calculations
• Customizable memory, storage, and CPU costs at the application level
• Custom group creation to bundle VMs with applications and business units
• Custom chargeback fields for daily allocation of additional costs, such as data center space

“As recently as a couple of years ago, most management add-ons for VMware provided little more than a few extra alerts, a prettier dashboard, or some cleaner reports,” said Bartoletti. “Now we’re seeing vendors like VKernel up the ante with analytics, taking vCenter metrics and rolling them up with some intelligence into unified and consolidated health and performance indicators.”

Bartoletti also notes that platform providers like VMware aren’t just sitting around idle; they’re also keeping others on their toes by coming out with products like VMware vCenter Operations. He added, “This is great for virtual infrastructure managers, who are going to be measured moving forward on the performance of virtualized apps, not just on consolidation ratios or physical server cost savings.”

VKernel doesn’t seem to be too phased by the introduction of VMware’s vCenter Operations. In fact, the company told InfoWorld that VKernel’s existing products are already doing quite well against the competition because of the company’s innovative approach of building a powerful analytics engine into an easy-to-deploy and easy-to-use solution. But as the competition heats up and the virtualized environments become more heterogeneous in the future, VKernel believes its support for Hyper-V will only strengthen their competitive positioning.

In addition to heterogeneous environments, Rosemblat also identified that VKernel is beginning to work with more and more customers who are basing their initial virtualization projects on Microsoft and Hyper-V or are completely moving away from VMware in favor of the Hyper-V platform. VKernel will be well positioned for a homogeneous Hyper-V environment as well.

Currently, a select few VKernel products simultaneously support both VMware and Hyper-V hypervisor platforms. In the past, VKernel products were released with VMware-only support based on market requirements. However, the company told InfoWorld that all of VKernel’s products will soon feature compatibility with both virtualization platforms. Keep an eye out for future product announcements.

Bartoletti left this word of caution for the management ecosystem: “Make sure you add true value above the metrics anyone can collect from vSphere or Hyper-V, because multiplatform support alone won’t be enough to differentiate — VMware and Microsoft are also very aware that the real money is starting to come more and more from the management stack.”

VKernel Capacity Analyzer with Hyper-V 4.4 and Chargeback with Hyper-V 2.6 are available for a 30-day free trial with pricing starting at $299 per socket per application.

This article, “VKernel expands performance, capacity management on Microsoft Hyper-V,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.