VKernel was acquired by Quest

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.

The good part of the Acquisition, that VKernel will still be allowed to operate independently, & their customers will not have to miss their great products as they will continue working on the same product lines. Though VKernel will now have a larger marketing and financial ability behind them, which should improve their chances of growth and success. The good part for VKernel existing customers nothing will change and they will still get their support the same way they always did. One thing I hope VKernel keep doing & they were really good at is to continue providing great free management tools for the SMB who can not afford such a product or who need a product to survive with till their next buying cycle.… Read More

Zombie VM interview just before Hallowe’en

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:

What are you waiting for get your guns and start shooting some Zombie VMs before they take over your datacenter on Hallowe’en night.… Read More

VKernel news items in association with upcoming Chargeback 2.0 release.

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.

Tina has ended her e-mail by the below phrase, that I thought worth sharing as it seems VKernel vision to play a part of the booming cloud market:

“So you can see Chargeback as a key component to cloud strategy.”

If you get to test chargeback for VMware or Hyper-v, I would love to hear your feedback in the comments area below.… Read More

VKernel AppVIEW 1.0 is available immediately for free download

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 Dashboard

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.

VKernel AppView 1.0 will ensure you can answer the following questions about how your most important VMs are performing:

  • Are VMs having performance problems?
  • Which resources are causing potential performance problems?
  • AppVIEW provides current and thirty day historical visibility to potential CPU, memory, disk and storage I/O bottlenecks for your top five application VMs. As priorities change, you can change to a different application VM and start collecting data immediately.

Although VKernel AppView 1.0 point you out to your VMs performance problems, you will need to combine it with VKernel Optimization Pack and VKernel Capacity Analyzer to be directed on how to resolve these issues.… Read More

VKernel Capacity View

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 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:

  • Virtual machine I/O Latency
  • Under-provisioned memory, CPU, storage
  • Low capacity for new deployments
  • Over-provisioned memory, CPU, storage

2- Deployment Statistics
You get an easily accessible, desktop view to how your virtualization resources are deployed. This valuable information allows you see the efficiency of your environment and how it can be improved and includes:

  • # of VMs, hosts, data stores, clusters, etc.
  • Total available CPU, memory and storage
  • Resources allocated as a % of available capacity

What will surprise you about Vkernel is the cost of it?… Read More