* Profiler for VMware from Tek-Tools Software provides agentless visibility into the virtual infrastructure
As Neal Weinberg pointed out in January, VMware isn’t just hot – it’s on fire. If your company is one of more than 20,000 that have bought into the VMware mode of server virtualization, you may be interested in a new management tool just announced last week.
Last week, Tek-Tools Software announced the availability of Profiler for VMware, its new reporting and monitoring framework for virtual environments. Tek-Tools already had a line of products for separately monitoring and managing storage, servers, applications and data protection, so the next logical step was to provide a single view into all of those elements within a virtual infrastructure.
Profiler for VMware provides agentless visibility into the virtual infrastructure (and the physical world, as well) to allow you to do capacity planning, performance monitoring and availability management. It’s designed to give you centralized control and decrease the complexity of managing a sprawling virtual environment.
Ed Delgado is a Storage Administrator/Sr. Unix Administrator at RiskMetrics Group, a financial services risk management and compliance company. Delgado says that when his company started rolling out VMware to six locations around the world, he knew that managing the environment would be more complex. Delgado has been beta testing Profiler for VMware for a couple of weeks. He calls the tool “extremely helpful,” citing several examples of how Profiler saved his team hours of work.
For instance, Delgado received e-mail notification from one of his remote locations that an ESX cluster with 40 virtual machines was having performance issues. Delgado brought up his Profiler console and looked at a week’s worth of historical data for that ESX server to see what was causing the problem. He spotted the virtual machine that was taking up massive amounts of resources. He logged onto the machine, discovered a runaway Java process, and killed it. The whole process took about 20 minutes. Delgado says that without Profiler for VMware, he probably would have used the VMware console, where he wouldn’t have access to quite as much historical data. The process would have been “clunkier” and it would have taken several hours to diagnose and resolve the problem.
One of the areas where Profiler for VMware offers great benefits is storage capacity planning. As you grow your virtual infrastructure, it’s easy to over-allocate storage to the various virtual machines. In fact, a December 2007 survey conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group reveals that more than half of the organizations polled experienced a net growth of total storage volume since implementing server virtualization.
Profiler for VMware can show you how you have your storage space allocated, how much of it is actually being used, and where you have “wasted space” – storage that is allocated to a VM but not being used. You also can do trending and forecasting to see how your datastores are growing and when they will each reach a critical point.
You can monitor the performance of all your ESX servers over time from a single view. Keep track of your VM inventory, status, and resource utilization, and view aging reports to see what has been used and when.
The product comes with a number of canned reports that can be customized using a report wizard. Operators and administrators can view status or run performance and configuration reports from any supported web browser. This flexibility is help when you have multiple locations under management.
Pricing for Profiler for VMware starts at $995 per ESX host, regardless of how many guests you have on the server, and volume discounts are available. This pricing model can yield significant savings when you compare the Tek-Tools product to larger management frameworks such as Patrol from BMC Software.
If your virtual environment is growing (and whose isn’t?), it’s worth your time to check out this new management tool.
