Vkernel Capacity Analyzer 3.0 - shining light into hidden corners

Alex Bakeman, CEO of Vkernel, and Christian Simko, Senior Director of Marketing Communications, and I spent an interesting hour talking about Vkernel Capacity Analyzer 3.0 and the philosophy behind it. After a few minutes, it was clear to me that Vkernel was trying to provide a light so that organizations could see into all of the hidden corners of their virtual infrastructure on industry standard systems in the datacenter.

I've spoken with these gentlemen in the past and have always found the conversation interesting and informative (see V-Kernel Capacity and Chargeback Virtual Appliance and Vkernel’s catchphrase “performance lifecycle management”).

How does Vkernel describe this new release?

VKernel Corporation, a provider of easy-to-use and quick-to-deploy management tools for dynamic data centers, announced today the availability of its Capacity Analyzer 3.0 predictive capacity monitoring and analysis solution for VMware ESX environments. Capacity Analyzer 3.0 includes a new simplified tabular-based user-interface (UI), visibility into performance and capacity at the virtual machine (VM) level, and expanded data storage statistics and information.

What's new?

Here's how Vkernel describes the new version of Capacity Analyzer:

VKernel's patent-pending Capacity Analyzer technology enables IT administrators to achieve maximum performance with the right amount of resources. Capacity Analyzer is the only VMware ESX monitoring solution that predicts problems days before they occur so issues can be fixed prior to performance degradations.  The new features in Capacity Analyzer 3.0 further simplify how administrators use the product and delivers even more critical resource utilization and capacity information.

• Identifies VM level bottlenecks – In addition to identifying current and future bottleneck issues in hosts, clusters, and resource pools, Capacity Analyzer 3.0 includes VM level bottleneck information.  With hundreds to thousands of deployed VMs, organizations’ IT staffs can save precious time with Capacity Analyzer’s ability to monitor and identify VM bottlenecks
• New simplified UI – Tabular-based UI simplifies navigation and helps users quickly find critical information
• More data storage statistics – Expanded storage statistics identify unit name and logical unit number (LUN) and includes all virtual objects using a specific storage resource
• Designed for enterprise scalability, Capacity Analyzer proactively and continuously monitors shared CPU, memory, network, and disk (storage and disk I/O) utilization trends in VMware ESX environments across VMs, hosts, clusters, and resource pools enabling users to:

• Predict and avoid costly performance degradations and downtime by properly allocating resources
• Get more out of existing VMware infrastructure, so unnecessary hardware and software purchases can be delayed
• Safely increase virtual machine (VM) densities to lower the cost per VM
• Find available capacity to safely add new VMs
• Identify the top resource consumers
• Set alerts to take the necessary proactive measures to avoid problems altogether

Snapshot Analysis

Vkernel has built an engine with a great deal more capability than they're current speaking about. They've developed the ability to examine in detail what VMs are on the network, what they're doing (or not doing), who is using them (or whether than not being used) and present a complete picture to the IT administrator. One of the more noteworthy portions of their approach is to provide a simple, easy to use approach to what is a very complex issue.

Vkernel has chosen to create powerful tools that address the most pressing needs an IT administrator has without overwhelming him/her with features and functions that will be seldom used, if ever.