Post-acquisition, Quest and VKernel merge virtualization management solutions

Back in November, InfoWorld reported on Quest Software’s acquisition of VKernel, a competitor that, like Quest, provided a suite of management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments. At the time, the official announcement provided very little information about the acquisition itself, let alone any product road map discussions. However, VKernel representatives came forward to say it would be business as usual for VKernel after the acquisition, except the company would have the full backing of its now much larger parent company, Quest.

But after initially hearing the news of the acquisition, one of the questions that immediately came to mind was what would Quest do with two competing virtualization management solutions. Today, nearly four months later, it looks as though that question has finally been answered.

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VKernel, now a subsidiary of Quest Software, announced the expansion of its vOperations Suite (vOPS). This latest version of vOPS will now include products from its parent company such as Quest vFoglight, vFoglight Storage, and vOptimizer. This new combination will provide a single solution for VM administrators to manage all infrastructure areas related to their virtualized data centers and cloud environments.

Specifically, the unified vOperations Suite will now extend monitoring capabilities to:

• The storage area network (SAN)
• The guest OS inside a VMware or Hyper-V virtual machine
• Physical servers that have not been virtualized
• Application-level monitoring

The new suite is built around two product lines: vOperations Server and vOperations Storage.

vOperations Server is offered in three editions: The free version called Explorer provides basic monitoring of a virtualized environment with regards to performance, capacity, or efficiency issues of VMs, hosts, and datastores. A Standard edition provides remediation of those issues, as well as virtual server performance analysis, capacity management, optimization, and chargeback. Beyond those features offered in the Standard edition, an Enterprise edition adds near real-time application monitoring, as well as monitoring of the guest OS and the physical servers. Standard is priced at $549 per socket and Enterprise is $799 per socket.

vOperations Storage offers two editions: Monitor, designed for administrators needing deep visibility into the SAN, visualizes the topology from VM to disk, highlights where issues are present and the root causes to the problems; and vOptimizer, which helps remediate storage issues through automation capabilities. Monitor is priced at $499 per socket, while vOptimizer is $299 per socket.

“Virtualization administrators have long searched for a data center management system to gain visibility across the many layers that make up a virtualized environment: from storage array to guest OS,” said Bryan Semple, chief marketing officer at VKernel. “Previous attempts to gain this holistic visibility have either required multiple vendors, or have involved complex large-scale management platforms that are time consuming and not cost efficient.”

Semple added that when virtualization admins approach VKernel at trade show events, his company will have the answer to the virtualization management questions they seek. By combining VKernel and Quest Software product lines, the company will be able to offer in-depth storage visibility; they will be able to monitor both physical and virtual servers; and they will now be able to show administrators what is driving performance issues for business-critical virtualized applications like Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Exchange.

But beyond the technology itself, what’s really interesting are the product decisions that Quest made.

Remember back in November when I stated the following:

With increased competition coming from VMware’s expansion into the virtualization management stack, the acquisition begins to make perfect sense. However, much like VMware’s pain in trying to consolidate management applications — in-house developed products, products gained through acquisition, and those products thrown over the fence from its parent company EMC — I don’t know how easy it will be for Quest to ultimately decide between (or merge) its own virtualization product lines with those created by VKernel. But these guys are smart, and they need to make sure they can out build and outthink the monster-sized VMware that is currently both partner and competitor.

Honestly, I assumed that Quest — as the acquirer and the larger vendor — would allow VKernel, the acquired and much smaller vendor, to co-exist for a while as an independent company and to continue to sell its own branded solutions until one day when Quest would bring them in-house, rebrand them, and consume what it could into the vFoglight product lines. Precedent after all had been set with the Vizioncore acquisition.

However, things didn’t quite work out that way. Instead, I believe Quest did something very intelligently and very different from the norm. Instead of Quest consuming VKernel’s product line into its own and changing the way VKernel sells and markets its product line to match the process that Quest had been using with vFoglight, it was the other way around! As explained above, the Quest product line is now part of the VKernel vOPS solution suite, and Quest will evidently continue to leverage VKernel’s much friendlier sales method of “try before you buy” and its software “freemium” methodology that administrator users are becoming accustomed to and prefer.

By moving toward a more ease-of-use approach or an out-of-the-box software experience, Quest may find itself better positioned to compete with the likes of SolarWinds, Veeam, VMTurbo, and Zenoss who also pride themselves on being cost effective and offering easy-to-use product suites.

Now that the vFoglight products have been consumed into VKernel vOPS, we need to see how well the VKernel team can continue to improve the old vFoglight products in order to make them, for lack of a better word, “VKernelized.” Nice move, Quest! What do you think?  Did Quest make the right decision here?

This article, “Post-acquisition, Quest and VKernel merge virtualization management solutions,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.