Quite a while ago, I had an interesting conversation with the good folks of Tek-Tools. They've been offering management tools for physical environments for a number of years. As their customers used virtual machine software to consolidate multiple workloads onto a small number of physical servers, Tek-Tools looked at that environment to uncover ways their products could help make the lives of their customers (over 800 at this point) better. In February, the company launched the Profiler for VMware, a new module in The Profiler Suite, to optimize capacity utilization, performance, and availability of virtual IT infrastructures. This sounds pretty basic and yet the impact of having these tools could be profound.
Here's how the company describes their product:
Profiler for VMware provides visibility for:
- Capacity planning – Eliminating wasted storage, reclaiming orphaned storage, and developing strategic growth plans based upon historical utilization, trending, and forecasting for both allocated and utilized storage.
- Virtualization planning - Identifying candidates for virtualization.
- Performance monitoring – Utilizing real-time and historical analysis and what-if scenario planning to optimize performance in the virtual environment.
- Availability monitoring – Tracking inventory, status, and resource-utilization with threshold-based alerts across the virtual environment.
Snapshot Analysis
Although some of the capabilities of Tek-Tools VMware Profiler appear pretty basic, the information it provides could save organizations a great deal of money by preventing over provisioning of virtual machines. Unless I'm mistaken, many organizations embarked on the journey towards a more virtualized industry standard system environment as a way to deal with under utilization of their physical resources. They didn't want to pay for resources they really couldn't use.Once these organizations started on the journey they discovered that the territory they were covering was a bit different than the map they brought with them. They found that it was difficult to find virtualized resources, determine how they were being used and whether they had been set up to use resources such as processor time, memory and storage efficiently. Most were unaware that making better use of the organization's memory and storage resources could save the organization a great deal of money. Tek-Tool's product is one way an organization could go about the business of monitoring system resources.