Netuitive this week announced software that the company says will help IT managers using VMware technology more quickly pinpoint poorly performing virtual machines.

Netuitive SI for VMware is designed to help IT managers spot performance problems across VMware virtual environments. The software can identify virtual machines, host servers, clusters and resources pools, and it can map the dependencies among the elements in a virtual environment. The latter feature is what makes the software capable of learning normal behavior and spotting anomalies that could represent performance issues, the company says.

"IT managers need to string all this data together and in the realm of virtualization, change is the norm not the exception. It would be impossible to track all those dependencies manually," says Nicola Sanna, president and CEO of Netuitive. "We learn the normal operating behavior for [VMware] ESX servers and virtual machines, and we use our algorithms and analytics to identify badly behaving [virtual machines]."

Netuitive SI for VMware installs on a server and integrates with VMware's Virtual Center. The software scans the customer environment for ESX servers and uses Virtual Center's configuration capabilities to learn the elements in the virtual environment. The software baselines behavior across physical and virtual machines, and can alert IT managers to anomalies in performance as many as two hours prior to an actual degradation, the company says.

Netuitive competes with the likes of BMC, CA, HP, Hyperic, IBM and Opsware in virtual machine management. Vendors are looking to address the inevitable management challenges IT manager will face putting virtualization technology in production environments. The ability to narrow down performance issues on physical and virtual servers will become critical, according to industry watchers.

"Virtual machines represent a different scenario within data centers. The flexibility of moving virtual machines around also poses changes to the network traffic and server load," says George Hamilton, director of Yankee Group's enabling technologies enterprise group. "Netuitive is managing service levels and performance from the virtual machine perspective. The software takes a business service management approach that models everything, builds a baseline of behavior, and then monitors the environment for anomalies that would represent degrading performance."