Tek-Tools Profiler for VMware: virtualization management suite

Tek-Tools Software, a provider of IT resource management software solutions, announced a new module for the company’s Profiler Suite – Profiler for VMware. The new module is designed to optimize capacity utilization, performance, and availability of virtual IT infrastructures. With the addition of this module to the Profiler Suite, end users can now monitor all four IT infrastructure components – servers, storage, backup and apps – from one console including virtual servers.

“Profiler for VMware showed us that we could take many of our physical hosts and convert them to Virtual Machines, saving us space and cost in our datacenters and helping us centralize over eight terabytes of storage,” said Ed Delgado, Storage Administrator, Risk Metrics. “It is a welcome addition to the Profiler Suite. Now I can look across the entire IT infrastructure – physical and virtual — from a single console. At a glance from the Profiler console I can see how servers are performing, how much storage is available, the status of backup operations and application availability. Plus, I can drill down in any area for more in-depth reporting, the growth rate of allocated storage or historical performance of ESX servers, for example.”

According to the company, Profiler for VMware provides visibility for:

• Capacity planning – Eliminating wasted storage, reclaiming orphaned storage, and developing strategic growth plans based upon historical utilization, trending, and forecasting for both allocated and utilized storage.

• Virtualization planning – Identifying candidates for virtualization.

• Performance monitoring – Utilizing real-time and historical analysis and what-if scenario planning to optimize performance in the virtual environment.

• Availability monitoring – Tracking inventory, status, and resource-utilization with threshold-based alerts across the virtual environment.

To find out more about the product, I spoke with Steve Harding, Director of Marketing at Tek-Tools.

Q. What made Tek-Tools get into the virtualization management business?

A. Customer demand. Tek-Tools has more than 800 customers using the Profiler Suite, which has been monitoring the physical infrastructure – servers, storage, backup and applications – for years. Customers said, we’re adopting virtualization technologies and it’s adding a significant layer of complexity in terms of management. Tek-Tools is introducing Profiler for VMware as its first virtualization monitoring tool to provide customers with visibility into the virtualized environment from the same solution that monitors their physical infrastructure.

Q: What do you feel are some of the biggest limitations of virtualization management right now? And how does Tek-Tools fill that void?

A: Virtualization has been positioned as the savior for server sprawl, and while it does deliver tremendous utilization improvements, it adds management complexity and can lead to virtual server sprawl. With consolidation, you no longer have physical servers to go to, and therefore you need visibility, or a “super human” admin to cope with it all. Profiler for VMware delivers visibility into the virtual environment. With this new module, the Profiler Suite provides end-to-end visibility into the virtual and physical infrastructure from a single console.

Q: How is your company addressing the challenges posed by virtualization?

A: By providing visibility into the two big areas of the IT shop today: Physical and Virtual, Admins can now look at the performance of all components in each one of those groups from one single easy-to-use console.

Also, virtualization immediately causes server and storage sprawl. Profiler can help identify over- or under-utilized resources and reclaim wasted storage that was not easy to identify before.

Q: Your software has been described as being agentless. Can you describe for us how you get the data and how you interact with the virtual machines?

A: Profiler for VMware leverages VMware’s native APIs. The Profiler modular architecture allows for a single point for data-collection, or multiple for large environments. Profiler’s data collectors make web services calls to the VMware’s Virtual Center console.

For smaller environments where Virtual Center is not available, Profiler allows polling data remotely from each individual ESX Hosts if desired.

Q: With Profiler for VMware now released, what are your thoughts on a Xen-based profiler or Hyper-V? Is heterogeneity important to your users? Or are they more concerned with managing VMware and physical environments?

A: We are definitely looking into other virtualization vendors and yes, heterogeneity is important to our customers and therefore to us. We decided to start with VMware given the fact that it’s currently #1 in the market. We treat virtualization as a platform/category and not as a single vendor. Tek-Tools has always been platform-neutral and we try to support every major vendor in each category. You can expect to see announcements about expanding our virtualization platforms support from us soon.

Q: Where do you see virtualization heading in the next year or two?

A: It’s moving more toward the old “Mainframe days”, or grid-computing model, where administrators will have a big cluster of heterogeneous resources (servers, storage, etc.) and that cluster will become a “Big Black Box” which could be thought as a big supercomputer. It’s not a new concept at all but there’s new terminology and technology around it.

Profiler for VMware is generally available directly and through Tek-Tools’ channel partners. Pricing starts at $995 USD/ESX host regardless of the number of guests on the server.

I’d like to thank Steve Harding and Tek-Tools for taking the time to speak with me.