VKernel is well known for their use of the virtual appliance. And the company is continuing down that virtual path with its latest offering - the VKernel Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer Virtual Appliance. The virtual appliance is said to identify current and future capacity bottlenecks to help ensure the performance of the VMware ESX Server environment. It does so by continuously monitoring CPU, memory and storage VKernel is well known for their use of the virtual appliance. And the company is continuing down that virtual path with its latest offering – the VKernel Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer Virtual Appliance. The virtual appliance is said to identify current and future capacity bottlenecks to help ensure the performance of the VMware ESX Server environment. It does so by continuously monitoring CPU, memory and storage utilization trends in the environment – three of the leading virtualization bottleneck areas and the three areas that have big influence over the performance of the entire environment. Do you want to increase your virtual environment’s performance? Who doesn’t? Start by checking these bottlenecks. If your CPU is being over utilized because of your server consolidation plan, then you’ve just swung to the opposite side of the fence from the “my server is being underutilized at 5%” way of thinking. If you aren’t paying attention to the RAM consumption on your host, your system could start swapping to disk. And we all know that disk is way slower than RAM. This leads us to disk I/O bottlenecks. The more virtual machines you are able to pack onto your host server, the more contention across the disk I/O subsystem. If everything is waiting on disk I/O responses and data returns, it doesn’t matter how fast the other components are in the system. According to the company, organizations can increase performance and significantly reduce downtime problems that lead to escalating business and IT costs and negative perceptions of virtualization within business units by properly managing capacity bottlenecks. In minutes, the VKernel capacity bottleneck analyzer can be deployed to show where capacity bottlenecks are today and where problems are predicted to occur in the future.“At the velocity organizations are virtualizing their server environments, IT groups must proactively monitor and eliminate their capacity bottlenecks or they risk facing serious downtime and performance issues,” said Alex Bakman, founder and CEO of VKernel. “With our Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer Virtual Appliance, we are empowering IT staff with a very simple and easy-to-learn UI from which they can instantly identify their most critical bottleneck problems and take proactive measures against predicted future bottlenecks.” The virtual appliance is currently available as a Beta trial download, but the full production version is expected to be available by March 31, 2008. Software Development