VKernel's Modeler virtual appliance quickly models virtual infrastructure additions and changes to properly build a virtual environment, validate changes, and proactively prevent problems VKernel — well known for its capacity-planning virtual appliance technology for VMware ESX environments — has moved into modeling “what if” scenarios with its latest software, the VKernel Modeler virtual appliance. The Modeler virtual appliance provides IT staff with an interactive sandbox to quickly test and validate additions and changes in a VMware ESX infrastructure to see what the performance impact will be before the changes are made in the production environment. “Because of the dynamic nature of virtual infrastructure, adding new virtual machines and making simple changes can drastically affect performance,” said Alex Bakman, founder and CEO of VKernel. “VKernel Modeler enables users to simulate hundreds of “what if” scenarios in a sandbox environment to see how the changes will impact the infrastructure. By modeling performance-impacting changes in pre-production, user can see where problems may occur, take proactive and corrective actions, and make the changes/additions with confidence.” Some of the common use cases for Modeler are: Seeing what will happen when a host is suspended for maintenance or a virtual machine is powered down. Pre–testing VMotion scenarios to make sure sufficient resources exist. Seeing the effect on resource capacity of adding a new host/virtual machine or removing existing ones. Determining how performance will be affected if resource changes are made to hosts, clusters, and/or resource pools. Learning whether a configuration change be made without causing performance degradations or downtime. The company has been a VMware Technology Alliance Partner for a while now and, as such, has been creating VMware-certified virtual appliances to meet VI3 user demands. But the market is evolving and many see the virtualization space becoming a heterogeneous world, VKernel included. Next stop on this virtual road trip: expanding into Microsoft Hyper-V.“The reason for supporting Microsoft Hyper-V is quite simple,” said Bakman. “We’re already seeing Hyper-V getting market traction and that will just continue to increase as Microsoft improves it with every release. Just like with VMware, there are still management challenges that need to be addressed to ensure the performance of the virtual infrastructure.” Bakman added, “Initially, we see Hyper-V being most prevalent in the SMB space, based on pricing and VMware’s current entrenchment in the Fortune 500. However, there will be many mixed hypervisor environments and that will drive demand for tools that manage more than one hypervisor using a single solution.”VKernel is also looking into supporting Citrix Xen. The company has already been approached by Citrix to support the Xen platform, but it hasn’t seen enough market momentum yet to fund the development effort. However, VKernel did say that this could change based on the Citrix desktop virtualization strategy and the need for management tools to assure that performance levels are consistently met.Stay tuned! Software Development