The folks from V-Kernel contacted me and asked if I was interested in learning more about their product. I, of course, said yes. I know, it's a disease. I can't help myself. I'm really interested in learning more about virtualization technology.
Quick rundown of V-Kernel
Here's a capsule description of V-Kernel's product taken from the company's own literature.
- First certified Virtual Appliance by VMware to do Chargeback and Capacity
- No installation required
- Deployment in minutes after download
- Easy of use, intuitive UI
- Capacity and chargeback reports in minutes
- Tight integration with Virtual Center-near zero ongoing administration
- Learns you Resource Pools, Clusters and Folders
- Self updated from VC on any changes in your environment
- Vmotion, DRS, HA aware
Snapshot analysis
It is clear to me that management of virtualized resources is clearly an important area of competition within the market for virtualization technologies. I've spoke with quite a number of companies that offer management tools either as their only product or as part of a larger product portfolio. This means that the folks at V-Kernel face pretty stiff competition.
In a more narrow view, only one or two of the competitors focus on change management and charge back for use of virtual resources. So, that cuts the competition down somewhat. V-Kernel is still challenged to be heard over what others are saying.
It's not clear to me if offering technology as a virtual appliance is always going to be acceptable to IT decision-makers. It appears that Catbird is making some headway with this approach when offering its security product V-agent. and Vyatta appears to also be doing well with its network routing/firewall/etc. appliance. Others who have taken the approach of offering technology prepackaged as a software appliance have not done so well.
V-Kernel has chosen an area of management that large organizations will require and may find some success in that area of focus. It is not at all clear that smaller organizations will find this function necessary.