Virtualization Report | David Marshall » TAG: Virtual Appliances

April 16, 2008 | Comments: (0)

VKernel virtual appliance identifies virtualization bottlenecks

TAGS: Virtual Appliances

VKernel announced that it was ready to ship its Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer virtual appliance. The appliance is designed to help you with your VMware ESX environment by identifying current and future capacity bottleneck issues in order to help lower the cost of each virtual machine while working towards providing higher performance.

The company said their patent-pending technology will continuously monitor CPU, memory and storage utilization trends across VMware ESX hosts, clusters and resource pools. The virtual appliance makes use of a simple-to-use, single management dashboard and provides users with the ability to receive alerts via email or SNMP.

"When properly detecting capacity bottlenecks, organizations can increase performance and reduce downtime problems that lead to escalating business and IT costs and negative perceptions of virtualization within business units," said Alex Bakman, founder and CEO of VKernel. "The real challenge for IT staffs is finding a solution that helps them identify capacity bottlenecks without wasting countless man-hours sifting through hundreds of management reports. Within minutes, our Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer can show exactly where capacity bottlenecks are today and where problems are likely to occur to maximize virtual machine utilization."

The appliance is currently available with a starting price of $199 per CPU socket. You can also download a 14-day trial version of the appliance.

Posted by David Marshall on April 16, 2008 07:57 PM

March 09, 2008 | Comments: (0)

VKernel virtual appliance identifies virtualization bottlenecks

TAGS: Virtual Appliances

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.

Posted by David Marshall on March 9, 2008 08:50 PM

August 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Beta 3 VHD

TAGS: Virtual Appliances

Microsoft has released a pre-configured VHD of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Beta 3 that can be downloaded and safely evaluated in a Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 environment in a similar manner to that of a VMware virtual appliance.

Overview:

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 is the next generation of the Windows Server operating system that helps information technology (IT) professionals maximize control over their infrastructure while providing unprecedented availability and management capabilities, leading to a significantly more secure, reliable, and robust server environment than ever before. Windows Server 2008 delivers new value to organizations by ensuring all users regardless of location are able to get the full complement of services from the network. Windows Server 2008 also provides deep insight into the operating system and diagnostic capabilities to allow administrators to spend more time adding business value.

Windows Server 2008 builds on the success and strengths of the award-winning Windows Server 2003 operating system and on the innovations delivered in Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2003 R2. However, Windows Server 2008 is far more than a refinement of predecessor operating systems. Windows Server 2008 is designed to provide organizations with the most productive platform for powering applications, networks, and Web services from the workgroup to the datacenter with exciting, valuable new functionality and powerful improvements to the base operating system.

Download the Test Drive image, here.

Posted by David Marshall on August 12, 2007 02:41 PM

May 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Capacity and Chargeback Virtual Appliance for VMware ESX

TAGS: Virtual Appliances

Before virtualization came around, IT departments typically had a process in place to account for department chargebacks when it came time for billing departments for computer resource consumption. Now, many of those systems just don't make a whole lot of sense.

Because virtualization consists of pooled resources, it becomes difficult to track and determine how these resources are really being used over time and thus how to account for them.

In a recent survey conducted by IDC's Industry Insights Information Technology Management Service (ITMS), results revealed that respondents view their existing IT chargeback (i.e., the IT expenses that are charged back to individual business units) processes as moderately effective and fair.

While the majority of companies report having begun deploying virtualization, only 50 percent are factoring virtualization resources into their chargeback methodologies. Of those who do, less than half (40 percent) believe it adds to business user confusion, while the balance (10 percent) report it enhances the process by more tightly mapping resources to business units.

To answer this problem, VKernel introduces what it calls the world's first capacity and chargeback virtual appliance which includes the operating system, MySQL and Apache wrapped up in a 400MB VM package. Drop the appliance into your VMware ESX Server environment and begin generating reports that show your virtual machine resource (CPU, Storage, RAM and network) consumption. Its reporting also helps you understand total resource consumption by groups of virtual machines that support business application such as email, CRM and other systems. And it generates chargeback reports that are based on actual consumption of resources in your environment.

You can download and try the V-Kernel Beta, here.

Posted by David Marshall on May 27, 2007 04:11 PM

May 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)

JumpBox - Virtual Appliances Made Easy

TAGS: Virtual Appliances

JumpBox has a simple goal in life, to make the deployment of server based software so easy, anyone can do it.

To do that, the company is creating a library of pre-installed, pre-integrated open source web applications that are bundled with the JumpBox platform. Using virtualization software like VMware, you simply download these application packages onto your computer, take about 30 seconds to configure everything and then run them. They make easy work of deploying these types of applications.

The company recently announced two new JumpBox bundled applications to their library: Joomla! and SugarCRM.

The Joomla! JumpBox was the most requested application on their download survey. Joomla! is described as one of the more popular content management systems today and is used widely around the world. This JumpBox includes Joomla! version 1.0.12.

The SugarCRM JumpBox comes with SugarCRM version 4.5.1c. If you aren't familiar with SugarCRM, it is a customer relationship management system that can be used to enhance marketing performance, drive sales, improve customer satisfaction and provide overall insight into business performance.

To make things even easier, JumpBox has recently added (at the request of many users in the company's forums) a series of tutorials on how to accomplish specific tasks with setting up and working with JumpBox. Specific questions include:

• Run a JumpBox the first time after downloading
  
• Backup your data
  
• Restore your data from a previous backup
  
• Configure the JumpBox to use a proxy
  
• Change the admin password
  
• Set a static IP address
  
• Login to the application itself

These and more tutorials can be found on the Web site or accessed here.

You can find out more about JumpBox and their offerings, here.

Posted by David Marshall on May 26, 2007 06:11 AM