Virtual Instruments launches VirtualWisdom 2.0

Pairing virtual processing software with virtual storage results in an environment that can be highly flexible, agile and yet, can be somewhat difficult to manage.  A great deal of what's happening in the virtual storage environment (a SAN) is hidden unless an organization instruments the SAN network and then finds a way to tie what's found there to what's happening on the processing side.  That's rather difficult and requires significant levels of expertise. Virtual Instruments has taken on this challenge and is now offering VirtualWisdom 2.0, a follow on to its product NetWisdom SAN offering.

Virtual Instruments offers a hardware device that attaches to the SAN and monitoring software (VirtualWisdom). They also offer software that works with VMware's VMSafe APIs to combine what is known of virtual machine operations and SAN operations (Probe VM). It then presents that analysis in an easy to use, customizable dashboard.

Here's what Virtual Instruments has to say about VirtualWisdom 2.0

Virtual Instruments, a leader in storage area network (SAN) and virtual infrastructure optimization solutions, today announced VirtualWisdom 2.0. The new solution provides a unique opportunity for IT management to reduce the risk of deploying virtualized business-critical applications and increase the financial benefits of aggressively deploying virtualization technology.  The ability to monitor, measure and analyze the effect of the SAN on virtualized applications increases overall application performance and reduces over-provisioning, resulting in sharply lower capital and operational costs associated with servers and storage infrastructure.

Virtual Infrastructure Optimization solutions, such as VirtualWisdom, are a critical part of any virtualization management strategy.  Through comprehensive, real-time instrumentation, VirtualWisdom 2.0 adds SAN I/O intelligence to VMware environments, enabling administrators, for the first time, to balance the deployment of virtual machines based on real-time measurements of I/O performance. By indentifying VMware performance bottlenecks in the SAN, VirtualWisdom 2.0 provides significantly higher virtual infrastructure utilization, allowing for delivery on the full promise of the reduced capital and operational costs of data center virtualization.

VirtualWisdom 2.0 is the successor to the popular NetWisdom SAN monitoring solution.  Key new features and performance enhancements make VirtualWisdom 2.0 easier to use, less expensive to deploy,  and faster to produce updates and reports. Targeted at enterprises looking to broadly deploy server and storage virtualization, VirtualWisdom 2.0 includes instrumentation, measurement and analysis tools – the basis for performance and resource optimization.  VirtualWisdom 2.0 provides real-time and historical insights into application latency and bandwidth consumption, as well as early detection and advanced notification of device failures, congestion, and errors.  It’s an early warning system that helps eliminate business-impacting outages.

Key new features of VirtualWisdom 2.0 include:

• Customizable widget-based dashboards that enable different user types to access critical infrastructure health information easier and faster.
• User-definable correlations enable “What-if” analysis based on real production data, providing IT managers the ability to accurately predict the effect of SAN configuration changes.
• ProbeVM helps VMware administrators improve application performance and resolve problems quickly by monitoring I/O from the virtualized servers through the SAN to the LUN(s) within storage arrays.

Snapshot analysis

It is clear that one has to be able to see what's happening in order to be able to evaluate what's happening and manage it correctly. It is also necessary to be able to integrate information about the virtual processing environment and information about SAN operations to be able really manage a complex virtualized environment. Virtual Instruments, among others, has gone a long way towards offering solutions for organizations' management requirements. They've not gone all the way, though.

At this point, Virtual Instruments is only supporting VMware, the leading player in the virtual machine software market, even though organizations may also have Xen, Hyper-V or even KVM-based virtual processing environments. I expect that they'll expand their offerings over time.