Vkernel vOPS 4 manages cross-data center, cross-hypervisor operations

Now that VMware 2011 has faded into history, I'm finding time to write about interesting technology that caught my attention while I visited the show floor. Vkernel's vOperations Suite 4 (vOPS 4) was announced at the show and, like all Vkernel tools I've examined to date, offered a pragmatic, quite useful take on managing virtualized data centers and cloud operations.

This version of vOPS addresses the concerns of organizations who have deployed workloads using a number of different virtual machine software products (limited to VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V and Red Hat's KVM at the moment), have deployed workloads to multiple data centers (both physical and virtual) and need to be able to see and balance workloads regardless of where the action is.

vOPS 4 offers a new "Virtualization Cost Index" (vCI) that helps organizations determine how cost effective each virtual machine and compare its cost structure to others in real time. vOPS4 also examines the host systems and resources consumed by each virtual machine. The tool also offers reports showing virtual machine costs so that an administrator can take appropriate action to optimize workloads.

Some other notable features are configurable dashboards allowing each administrator to focus on what's happen in his/her own environment; improved scalability and performance supporting several thousand virtual machines; and enhanced accounting capabilities allowing each virtual machine's costs to be set.

If your organization is deploying workloads supported by VMware, Microsoft and Red Hat hypervisors in multiple data centers or using hybrid cloud computing, vOPS 4 is worth a look.

I was surprised by the fact that the company didn't mention Xen or Citrix's XenSource in their announcement. The Xen open source project and Citrix's XenServer are used in thousands of data centers and by many cloud service providers. I suspect that this oversight will be addressed at some point in the future.