Virtualization Team

It seems the acquisition heat that has been spread like anything into the Virtualization space has got to VKernel this time. VKernel has announced acquisition by Quest Software (NASDQ: QSFT) last week on Wednesday, November 16, 2011. If you all remember Quest has acquired another one of my favorite Virtualization software company (VizionCore) on December 2008. It seems Quest has discovered the importance of their presence in the Virtualization Market, & I can admit they seems are doing the right acquisitions to extend their solutions to customers & areas that were out of reach before the Acquisition of such companies.

First of all I would like to say Happy Hallowe’en to everyone. I thought you might want to check how bad Zombie VMs can be to your Virtual Infrastructure. The below interview of a Zombie VM is quite interesting & funny specially just in time for Hallowe’en. Enjoy the video below:

Another Zombie VMs Video, & in fact my favorite in this theme:

Well do you want to kill some of these Zombie VMs and start your battle, then you might want to check out VKernel vScope Explorer which can easily spot Zombie VMs & the beauty of it its totally free. Check out the below video of VKernel vScope Explorer:

The VKernel Team has just sent me the below news items in regards of their upcoming chargeback 2.0 release & thought I will share it with all of you. Thanks Tina Dussault for the update.

1. This release extends Chargeback support to both Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX environments while also adding support for mixed chargeback models (allocation vs. usage).  Chargeback 2.0 is the second product from VKernel to support Microsoft Hyper-V following on the launch of the lastest version of VKernel Capacity Analyzer.

2. VKernel is the chargeback partner for Microsoft’s recently released Virtual Machine Manager Self-Service Portal 2.0 which was announced at Microsoft’s Worldwide partner conference this week in Washington DC. The self-service portal is a collection of tools and guidance from Microsoft enabling the creation of private, self-service clouds.

After having a look at VKernel Capacity View few days back, I have decided to give a look at VKernel AppVIEW 1.0. AppView 1.0 is VKernel latest free product. Where VKernel Capacity View looks at hosts, AppVIEW looks at individual application VMs to monitor and diagnose for such things as capacity bottlenecks and resource optimization.

VKernel AppView 1.0 help you monitor how well is your applications are performing on the most important 5 VMs in your Virtual enviornment. Limiting you to monitor the application on 5 VMs might seems limiting, but hey it suppose to be for your most important VMs & remember its a free product so it should have a limitation.

Checking out Vkernel Capacity View has been on my todo list for over a month, as I have been exhausted at work lately. Though now that I have given it a fast try, I think its really worth the effort. Vkernel Capacity View has a great dashboard that give you a laser vision sight of your Virtual enviornment Capacity usage. Vkernel Capacity View Dashboard has been one of the things that had really attracted me to the product. Below you can see an image of the dashboard.

VKernel Capacity View can provide information in two main areas:

1- Capacity Alerting

Capacity View collects CPU, memory and storage allocations and utilization levels. It then analyzes this data to provide you with desktop Capacity alerts concerning: