10 virtualization vendors to watch in 2009

Virtualization is expanding beyond test and development. People are no longer just sticking their big toe in the water; they are actually diving in and enjoying what many of us in the industry have known about for years now.

And folks are moving beyond simple consolidation as well. Sure, it’s still great to put 10 or 20 machines on a single server, but as our use cases advance, and as our virtualization knowledge and understanding advance, people are looking for more and more information about their environment. Just knowing that I’ve increased my consolidation ratio isn’t enough.

[ For more virtualization news, check out InfoWorld’s Virtualization Center and listen to the weekly Virtualization Report podcast. ]

I found it interesting that in a mid-2008 survey conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group, only a quarter of VMware users responded that the tools they had available to track and monitor their virtual infrastructures were sufficient to let IT maintain current or contractually required service levels.

That’s not to say that VMware and others aren’t trying to bridge the gaps. However, while VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, and others continue to push forward with their own management tool offerings, third-party companies in this virtualization ecosystem are stepping up to the challenge with their own solutions.

CIO.com recently took a look at 10 makers of VM management, configuration, and monitoring tools who they believe are worth watching in 2009.

• Akorri — Akorri’s BalancePoint management applications are designed to measure the capacity of physical servers and the performance capacity of the virtual machines they support in order to keep workloads from affecting application service levels. BalancePoint collects data from servers, storage, and applications to identify relationships among them and interactions that can affect performance.
• CiRBA — CiRBA tools are designed to help map out datacenter consolidations and virtual infrastructure development, combining capacity planning for both physical and virtual servers.
• Embotics — Embotics V-Commander automates the control of VMs according to policies based on performance or business criteria. V-Commander, and the free entry-level V-Scout are both designed to manage the lifecycle of individual VMs or the virtual infrastructure as a whole.
• Marathon Technologies — Marathon adds fault tolerance, high-availability, and disaster-recovery capabilities. The company’s everRun offers failover clustering, component-level fault tolerance that also protects storage and system components, and a system-level control that backs up memory being currently used by really critical applications.
• Neterion — Neterion’s solution is to put a single 10Gbps card in servers, adding both a huge network pipe and I/O regulation software designed to make it easier to juggle demands for bandwidth among the virtual switches VMs use as interfaces to their network connections, or guarantee minimum bandwidth for specific applications.
• Netuitive — Netuitive offers software that discovers, maps, and monitors virtual machines and virtual infrastructures and also tracks how applications and VMs run and responds when it spots trouble.
• Reflex Systems — Reflex Systems goes after security, automated management, and cross-platform support. Its Virtual Management Center includes modules for configuration management and provisioning, compliance monitoring and reporting, VM lifecycle management, security, and performance management for both VMs and the applications that run on them.
• Scalent Systems — Scalent agents sit on each physical and virtual machine maintaining a persistent memory of its network and storage relationships. The agents can manage local performance or configuration under the direction of a central controller and scripts written by IT managers.
• Third Brigade — Security specialist Third Brigade has expanded its host-based virtual-server security model to include not only non-virtualized systems but also cloud-based applications that live in shared infrastructures such as Amazon’s EC2. The company’s Deep Security offers firewall, intrusion protection, integrity monitoring, and compliance validation.
• VKernel — VKernel tools address not only the difficulty in knowing what VMs are running at any given time, but also what CPU, storage, network, and other datacenter resources they’re using individually or as a group. It is useful for chargeback and capacity planning as well.