virtualization.info

Last week Lanamark, another startup that, like VKernel, could be impacted by the launch of VMware CapacityIQ, released Suite 2009 R2.

And like VKernel, Lanamark is looking around, introducing support for Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, along with refreshed support for VMware (now up to vSphere 4.0) and Citrix (now up to XenServer 5.5).

Suite 2009 R2 also introduces enhancements to its online dashboard, but the most important thing is that the product can now collect data from up to 50,000 systems.

At the moment the company only offers a hosted version of its platform, but if VMware CapacityIQ will start to get some traction, Lanamark may be obliged to reconsider its go-to-market strategy and give the product on-premises.

Labels: Capacity Planning, Lanamark, Releases

At the end of October VMware released its first capacity planning tool: CapacityIQ.

As always happens when a market leader expands into a new segment, its previous partners suddenly turn into competitors.
Some of them are able to keep the pace and deliver value on top of the new product, but this requires a number of resources that not every startup has, and a cooperation between the two companies that the newcomer may be uninterested in.

VMware is in the capacity planning space since ever with its hosted and free service Capacity Planner. But so far the product has been accessible only to the Professional Services Organizations (PSOs), which granted enough room to the partners to sell their on-premises products.

Now, with CapacityIQ around, VMware partners may lose market share.
They still can try compete on price, number of features and frequency of updates, but will always be customers that want everything from a single vendor, and there will always be vendors that gives away their newest product to establish a presence in a new segment.

VKernel is one of those partners: the company criticized the value of CapacityIQ at launch, but now its running to give away its flagship product for free (for a limited timeframe anyway).
If you download their Capacity Analyzer before the end of the year, you’ll receive a free license for unlimited sockets. Perpetual.

And of course VKnernel now is also in hurry to clarify that support for Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer is coming.

Update: It seems that VKernel is not really giving away its flagship product, but a limited version called Capacity Modeler. Possibly the same tool that the company launched as beta in October 2008.
This post will be further updated with details as soon as possible.

Labels: Capacity Planning, VKernel

Yesterday VMware released the first version of its new capacity planning product: vCenter CapacityIQ 1.0 (build 199314).

As the name suggests, the product performs capacity planning on virtual infrastructures, applying continuous what-if analysis to figure out the best arrangement for virtual machines in different scenarios.
It offers reporting and recommendations.

CapacityIQ is made of two components: a vCenter plug-in and a virtual appliance that collects data about the virtual infrastructure in a dedicated database.

The product is unable to automatically reconfigure the virtual infrastructure according to its own recommendations, which is probably fine for most customers.
Anyway some companies may find attractive the idea to review the recommendation and just approve them.

CapacityIQ price starts at $1,204 for 1 CPU plus 1 year of Gold support.

The choice to release the product now is strange. Originally announced in January, the version of CapacityIQ that VMware ships today doesn’t support vSphere 4, so customers that are interested in it already know that the adoption will oblige them to stick VI3.x still for some time.

With this product VMware introduces yet another front of competition (and friction) with its partners: Novell/PlateSpin, CiRBa, VKernel, Lanamark, newcomers like Liquidware Labs and 5ninee, indirect competitors like ManageIQ, Embotics and Fortisphere, may be, or will be, impacted over time.

Labels: Capacity Planning, Releases, VMware

The startup 5nine is back with its third tool.
Launched in June, the company already released a capacity planning solution that includes a P2V migration tool and a firewall for virtual infrastructures.

The third product, currently in beta and scheduled for release later in Q4, is called Optimizer.

While P2V Planner performs what-if analysis and capacity planning on physical server that need to be converted in virtual machines, Optimizer does the same on already virtualized infrastructures.

It’s not clear why 5nine preferred to launch a separate tool rather than enrich P2V Planner with the Optimizer capabilities.
The physical to virtual capacity planning is something that non-enterprise customers do just a few times per year. Sometimes, in certain SMBs, this is done only once.
Optimizer may be used much more frequently than P2V Planner but it’s hard to believe that these customers would pay two times for the same engine.

Labels: 5nine, Capacity Planning, Releases

Last week Novell released version 3.7 of its capacity planning tool PlateSpin Recon.

This new version focuses much on storage (local disks as well as FC/iSCSI arrays), tracking its usage over time in physical and virtual machines.  
Even if the available documentation doesn’t clarify much about the new feature, the effort in this area is always welcome because of the strong investment in storage required to build a virtual infrastructure.

Recon 3.7 also introduces support for AIX workloads.
This is probably the only tool on the market able to analyze AIX machines and include them in the capacity plan.

Labels: Capacity Planning, Novell, PlateSpin, Releases

The Canadian startup CiRBA recently released a new minor update for its capacity planning tool Data Center Intelligence (DCI).

The company is trying to simplify the use of its product, so DCI 5.2 ships with a number of new, pre-defined analysis templates tailored for consolidation in VMware infrastructures.
CiRBA will release additional templates during the next quarter to support Hyper-V and Xen hardware virtualization, as well as IBM AIX and Oracle/Sun Solaris OS virtualization solutions.

CiRBA is one of the many companies that revolves around VMware. But the once preferred partner is about to compete with them by releasing CapacityIQ, somewhere next year. 
So no surprises that CiRBA is now looking around for new opportunities.

Labels: Capacity Planning, CiRBA, Releases

As usual VKernel continues to release updates for its products at a very fast pace. Two months after version 4.0, the startup is ready to launch the first minor upgrade for its flagship product: Capacity Analyzer 4.1.

The new build introduces a number of enhancements and some interesting new automated reporting capabilities:

• Automatic generation of alerts upon detection of ”abnormal” system behavior in capacity utilizations.
• Automatic reporting of key environment capacity trends.
• Automatic generation of utilization alerts upon detection of virtual machines’ drives activity

VKernel must have changed the licensing model for this product as one of the new features listed in the release notes says:

[VK–3439] — Implemented socket based license restrictions

Labels: Capacity Planning, Releases, VKernel

Despite its startup size VKernel continues to extend its portfolio, releasing new tools and updating the existing ones pretty much every month.
The last creation of the company is the Optimization Pack, just entered the public beta phase.

This new product includes three different tools:

• Wastefinder
  This one is able to recognize the storage, memory and CPU resources wasted by inactive virtual machines (including their snapshots and the templates they come from).
• Rigthsizer
  This one analyzes the virtual machines average utilization and peaks and suggests how to adjust virtual storage, vRAM and vCPUs accordingly.
• Inventory
  Easy to guess this one tracks the provision of virtual machines and generate reports about the inventory.

VKernel published a video about each new tool:

Labels: Capacity Planning, VKernel

Microsoft releases today the RTM version of its capacity planning tool Microsoft Assessment & Planning (MAP) Toolkit 4.0.

As anticipated during the beta program, this new version supports Hyper-V R2, that will be part of the Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM between today and tomorrow, and the inventory of VMware Server Hosts and Guests.

The product is still free of charge.

Labels: Capacity Planning, Microsoft, Releases

Yesterday, with a single step, a new startup called 5nine entered two crowded and market segments: the P2V migration and the capacity planning ones.

P2V migration tools have been progressively included into every major virtualization platform: VMware, Microsoft and Citrix for sure have their own, and Oracle has three R&D departments now to produce a cool one as well.
The fact that all of the are available for free negatively impacted the business of the other vendors in this segment, which are struggling to survive.

So far none of the competitors in this space had the farsightedness to merge the migration tools with a capacity planning platform, so to accelerate the virtualization adoption and justify the existence of stand-alone P2V tools. 
5nine seems to have exactly this strategy.

The US startup was probably founded earlier this year and seems privately funded.
It doesn’t expose much about its management team right now. The only two executives we know about are Dr. Konstantin Malkov, CTO, and Ratmir Timashev, Director.
Malkov comes from PWI Corporation, a consulting firm where he was the owner and CTO.
Timashev is the well known President of Veeam, so it’s easy to guess that in the future 5nine and Veeam will do business together.

The first product released by this startup is called P2V Hyper-V Planner.
As other capacity planning tools, it builds and maintains an inventory of the physical machines in the data center, tracking the usage of the application workloads and calculating different migration plans depending on business constrains and what-if scenarios.

5nine offers a free version of this product which seems only able to perform P2V migrations and provide basic reports.

The competition in the capacity planning space is remarkable, with VMware, Novell/PlateSpin, CiRBA, Lanamark and recently Liquidware Labs/VMsight.
On top of that it’s worth to highlight that Microsoft already offers a capacity planning tool for Hyper-V called MAP which is completely free.

5nine is now included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

Labels: 5nine, Capacity Planning, P2V/V2V Migration, Releases

Microsoft has just opened a new beta program for its almost unknown free capacity planning tool called Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) toolkit.

As for the previous versions, MAP 4.0 can be used to perform a capacity plan for Hyper-V and App-V but also for other, non-virtualization related tasks.
The most significant update of this new version anyway is the support for Hyper-V 2.0/R2 that will be released in late July for Microsoft partners and October 22 for the rest of the world.

On top of that MAP 4.0 can now perform the inventory of VMware hosts and guests:

In details, the new features available with MAP 4.0 are:

• Windows 7 Hardware and Device Compatibility Assessment
• Windows Server 2008 R2 Hardware and Device Compatibility Assessment
• Virtualization Candidates Assessment for Hyper-V R2 Server Consolidation
• Integration with the Microsoft Integrated Virtualization ROI Calculator
• Inventory of VMware Server Hosts and Guests
• User Interface and Proposal Customization for Partner co-branding

The beta program can be enrolled here.

Labels: Capacity Planning, Microsoft

Almost one month ago a new startup called Liquidware Labs entered the VDI space. 
Behind it there are the founder and former CEO of Vizioncore (acquired by Quest in January 2008) and the founder of Foedus (acquired by VMware in January 2008).

At the foundation of Liquidware Labs there’s the technology of another startup called vmSight, which has been acquired while in stealth mode and that is now rebranded as Stratusphere.

The new company continues from where vmSight left, using the same Connector ID technology to rate the physical desktop candidates for VDI environments or to identify poor user experience in an existing VDI environment.

On top of that Stratusphere 4.2 introduces the following major features:

• New VDI Assessment Module
  Stratusphere 4.2 add an entire new module for VDI Assessment. This includes new capabilities to deploy dissolvable Connector ID Keys to physical desktops to gather extensive real-world data on existing configurations and application usage patterns, as well as baseline performance and resource utilization, and a complete set of reports and analysis tools to assess the environment and plan for a migration to VDI. Analysis tools include the Inspector workbench with Machine Configuration, Resource Utilization and Configuration Cluster analysis, along with a complete set of VDI Assessment reports.
• VDI Fit and VDI UX Breakthrough Metrics for VDI
  Stratusphere 4.2 introduces two key new metrics, VDI Fit used in assessments to rate the fitness for a target VDI environment, and VDI UX used in diagnostics to rate the user experience of existing VDI deployments. Each metric relies on multi-variate analysis profile, and puts the tools to adjust the profile and rating system in the hands of the practitioner. The metrics can be adjusted and analyzed, and in the end provide a Red, Yellow, Green rating on all machines, users and applications. Analysis plot graphs are also provided so administrators can quickly identify the groupings and problems in their environments

Brian Madden published additional insights about the company roadmap:

Ultimately Liquidware Labs plans to have five products, although only the first two are available today. From a functionality standpoint, their products will include:

• Assessment module (available now) Gathers configuration details of physical desktops and measures actual workloads, establishing the baseline for the VDI environment. Creates VDI "fitness" reports and identifies clusters of desktops, resource requirements, etc. (more on this later)
• Diagnostics module (available now) Builds upon assessment data to collect detailed usage information about apps, networks, storage, etc.
• Capacity planning module (not yet available) This is the “what if” engine... What if I decided to go win7, or switched hardware, or let people use hulu? You could even stand up and pilot and then model it to scale.
• Migration module (not yet available) This is a component that can automate some of the actual migration work, like maybe tying into app compatibility lists and packagers, making sure that the right people have the right apps available (based on the assessment data)
• Support Center module (not yet available) This is a tool for Level 1 and Level 2 support personnel, with potential for user self-service. It will hook into the VDI environment and pull data from the other modules.

Labels: Capacity Planning, LiquidWare Labs, Releases, vmSight

VMware has recently released a new minor version of its free (if you are a VMware partner) capacity planning tool simply called Capacity Planner.

The new 2.7 version (build 32117) includes a long list of new features:

• Desktop Virtualization
  VDI assessments enable you to virtualize destops utilizing software profiles and base images.
• Software Profiles
  Software profiles replace application profiles and can now be edited by Partners. Software Profiles allow tags to describe the software. Software Profiles can represent applications and operating systems. They keep track of individual process utilization as well as system-wide use. More computing resource utilization dimensions are shown for each profile.
• Base Image Creation
  System Software Cluster analysis is used to build a few images that maximize software usage.
• VM Template Sizing
  You can create VM Templates, based on various base images, during an Optimization Scenario Analysis.
• Reporting
  Optimization reports now includes new reports. These reports are formally known as the Consolidation Estimator Reports. The new report is a complete assessment report. The controls for the output are located in the Assessment Global Settings. The link to get to the Global Settings is at the bottom of the Optimization Report Page. This report is the only place that contains the following information at this time: VM-to-VM Template mapping, VM Template Sizes, and Base Image Report. For the Custom Report, the display limit is set to 10,000. If the amount of data exceeds this limit, the data that exceeds the limit is not displayed.
• Scenario
  The scenario now includes the ability to select by system attributes. It also has a Base Image selection page. Selecting Base Images is required to include the Base Image, VM Template Size, and VM-to-VM Template mapping sections in the Assessment Report.
• User Group
  You can now create a user group to give users access to a company, template, report, or scenario.
• Access and Permissions
  The security model that has been used by company roles is now extended to templates. This allows individual access to templates by a single user or a group of users. Partners and VMware can create templates that are meant only for a certain group of users. This will remove the need to create multiple companies to manage users and templates.
• Date Range Selection
  Users can now select a range of dates to be used for the assessment.
• Alerts and Anomalies
  The behavior of alerts and anomalies has changed in this release.
• User Self-provisioning
  A Partner Company (only partner) can adjust the security settings in their company to allow users with the same email suffix that is supplied in the company information to request and automatically approve a login account. The Partner will need to create a suffix to enable this feature adjust the Security Policy to allow self-provisioning.
• Collector SSH Port setting
  The collector now allows the user to change the SSH port to something other than 22. This is a global setting and will not allow per system port settings for now.
• Collector/Dashboard Inventory Additions
  The Collector and the Dashboard now collect desktop inventory and show Video Card, PnP Devices, Pagefile, and Printers for the purpose of doing desktop assessments.
• Create new CE users
  You can now create a user within a CE assessment.
• Multiple Assessments
  More than one assessment per company is now supported.
• Sudo support
  Sudo support has been added in this release.

As Capacity Planner is a half-hosted solution, it seems that this update is still causing some service downtime as the VMware website reports at the moment of writing:

Special Notice: Temporary Maintenance
Emergency Service Interruptions to VMware Capacity Planner

You may encounter performance issues or may not have any access to the Capacity Planner Dashboard.
We appreciate your patience during this maintenance period. System maintenance is part of our commitment to continued service improvements and will help VMware better serve your needs.

Thank you,
The Capacity Planner team

Thanks to the Daily Hypervisor for the news.

Labels: Capacity Planning, VMware

The Canadian startup Lanamark continues to release new modules for its hosted capacity planning suite.

After the recent Desktop Analysis Pack, now the company launches a Storage Design Module.

The module assesses physical disks usage and I/O requirement, helping to properly size the SAN to host a virtual infrastructure for server consolidation or VDI scenarios.
This new component is also able to evaluate what-if scenarios taking care of technical constrains that may depend on the HBAs, FC switches and storage arrays that the customer wants to use.

Designing (or redesigning) a storage area network is one of the most critical and challenging tasks when embracing virtualization, and it’s where many companies discover many hidden costs.
Thus the new Storage Design Module is a needful component of the Lanamark Suite.

Labels: Capacity Planning, Lanamark, Releases

The Canadian startup Lanamark continues to unveil pieces of its hosted capacity planning solution.

After the major upgrade released at the beginning of this month, the company now makes available a new Server Virtualization Design Module.

The module does something truly useful: develops multiple capacity plans, one for each supported virtualization platform (Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, Virtual Iron and of course VMware ESX), and compares them side-by-side.

Every analysis takes into account technical (new/redeployed/upgraded servers, storage arrays support, etc.) and business (software license cost, delivered services) constrains.
To do so Lanamark built an online repository (which is constantly updated) featuring TCOs for every component of a virtual infrastructure.

Last but not least the new module is even able to calculate the power and carbon footprint for each configuration, using an energy cost and carbon emissions table that Lanamark keeps up-to-date for 100 worldwide countries.

Labels: Capacity Planning, Lanamark, Releases

After entering the market in June 2008 (read the virtualization.info coverage here) and releasing its first product in September of the same year, the Canadian startup Lanamark is ready to hit the market with the second version of its hosted capacity planning solution.

Lanamark Suite 2009 introduces the capability to monitor virtualization hosts (both Citrix XenServer 4.1/5.0 and VMware ESX 3.0/3.5 are supported today, Microsoft Hyper-V will come soon).

The feature is interesting as it allows the product to develop a capacity plan with more information than just the resources consumption of physical servers candidate for virtualization.

To further promote the product (Lanamark already offers free assessments) the company provides this new capability for free in every new assessment commencing prior to March 31, 2009.

Labels: Capacity Planning, Lanamark, Releases

Last week the Canadian company CiRBA released a minor update for its capacity planning tool: Data Center Intelligence (DCI).

DCI 5.1 introduces three interesting additions:

• a new Capacity Status Analysis module that continuously assesses the virtual infrastructure to ensure that it can meet the capacity planning requirements defined at the beginning of a project
• a collaboration module which allows members of a project to review and approve the actions suggested after a what-if analysis
• the capability to customize the dashboard depending on the job role of the user, and the capability to integrate the reports into corporate intranet portals

Labels: Capacity Planning, CiRBA, Releases

The Canadian startup Lanamark (see virtualization.info coverage here) is taking serious steps to promote its capacity planning service after just one month after the launch.

The company now offers a free, one-time capacity planning assessment for up to 500 desktops and servers, for a maximum of 10 days.

As expected, customers signing for this service will receive a performance trend report containing information about physical machines and workloads inventory, as well as CPU and memory usage.

This is a smart move from Lanamark: capacity planning is one of the fundamental steps that every company embracing virtualization should take but its cost is often too high to justify the investment.
With a one-time free assessment the startup may demonstrate the value of its service.

Nonetheless the company may have other reasons behind this promotion: the competition with VMware on is harsh as the virtualization leader is offering its hosted Capacity Planner for free since July and it includes a basic capacity planning tool in VI 3.5 at no additional cost.

Labels: Capacity Planning, Lanamark

This week Microsoft releases a new version of its free capacity planning tool called Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP).

Now the tool can discover and map which virtual machines are served by which virtualization host, meaning that Microsoft is working to extend the product capabilities to already virtualized environment for “continuous capacity planning”.

The new 3.2 version is available here, free of charge as usual.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Capacity Planning, Microsoft, Releases

The US startup VKernel seems restless and continues to release new products.
After announcing an enhanced search engine for VMware Infrastructures last month, the company now enters in beta phase for a brand new solution called Modeler.

Modeler seems a simulator able to connect to a VMware Infrastructure and replicate its environment in a sandbox. There customers can introduce variables to test what-if scenarios and measure performance and availability impact.

The product seems very interesting and it could be a nice step forward in capacity planning.

Enroll for the beta program here.

Labels: Capacity Planning, VKernel

In June a new startup focused on capacity planning came out of the stealth mode: Lanamark.
Last week the company finally launched its first product: Suite 2008.

As virtualization.info detailed in its early coverage, Lanamark Suite is made by an information collector that must be deployed at the customer’s site (Explorer), an online site where the collected data can be accessed (Portal) and a Windows application where data can be analyzed (Studio).

This 3-tiers architecture is specifically designed to target solution providers: a single Explorer machine can be deployed to each customer, all customers can be centrally managed through the Portal, each customer environment can be studied and carefully planned in-office thanks to the Studio without wasting time at the customer’s site.

The Suite is available as Professional and Team editions, starting at $40 per workload, but at the moment the company also offers a free trial to asses up to 200 servers.  

It’s impressive how Lanamark designed the product strictly following Microsoft design principles, from the version numbering and the edition naming to the UI featuring the Office 2007 ribbon.
The company even offers a Microsoft World 2007 plug-in to automatically generate reports so it’s easy to guess what buyer is specially welcome to discuss an early acquisition.

As already said, Lanamark will have a hard time to conquer market shares now that VMware offers its Capacity Planner for free to all its partners.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Capacity Planning, Releases

The almost unknown capacity planning tool that Microsoft offers since February 2008, Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP), just reached version 3.1 and now includes support for the new hypervisor Hyper-V 1.0.

The product comes free of charge and offers some valuable features like:

• agentless discovery of the assets (up to 100,000 machines)
• support for Hyper-V 1.0, Virtual Server 2005 and Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid) 4.5
• support for 32bit and 64bit platforms

Download it here.

Labels: Capacity Planning, Microsoft

Today a new virtualization startup enters the market: Lanamark.

The company was founded in 2007 by Mark Angelo, is currently based in Canada and has less than ten employes.
Hard to believe Lanamark is one of the few startups that isn't funded (yet) by a venture capital firm or an angel investor.

Angelo is a well-known figure in the virtualization industry coming from PlateSpin, where he was Product Line Manager for PowerRecon, and recently from VMLogix, where he was Director of Business Development.

Lanamark enters the capacity planning market, one of the most important segments recognized by virtualization.info in our Virtualization Industry Challenges report, where its CEO accumulated a lot of experience working on PowerRecon.

The capacity planning segment is populated by few but strong competitors which are already present on the scene since a while: Novell (through the acquisition of PlateSpin), CiRBA, VMware and Microsoft.
Despite that Lanamark may not have to compete with most of them.

The company in fact doesn't plan to directly sell its platform to customers, but rather aims at offering it only to OEMs and service providers.

To create a valuable proposition Lanamark developed a three-tiers architecture ideal for those scenarios where the capacity planning is performed by a 3rd party entity:

• the first component, Explorer, gets installed on a single machine in the customer network. From there it can discover all the physical assets on the site without any additional agent
• the second component, Portal (which is hosted by Lanamark itself), stores the data collected by the Explorer and manages the customers analysis
• the last component, Studio (which is managed by the system integrator), accesses the customer's data available at the Portal and performs the actual capacity planning

This approach, similar to the one used by VMware with its Capacity Planner, avoids the consultants to waste time at customer's site, performing the analysis and planning in house.
Obviously it may raise some concerns: the customer has to trust the whole platform when sending out its own precious data about company workloads and performance.
Lanamark will have to demonstrate that the transaction between all the components is secure enough, and that the Portal has acceptable data retain policies.

The company has another problem: VMware will allow its partners to use Capacity Planner for free within the end of this month, and Microsoft is working to offer its own capacity planning tool for free as well.
To win the competition Lanamark may bet on cross-platform capabilities: the platform will be able to perform capacity planning for multiple hypervisors, obviously including VMware, Citrix and Microsoft ones.

The product will be available soon through an early adoption program.
The 1.0 release instead is expected in Q3 2008.

Lanamark has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.
The Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Capacity Planning

The Canadian company CiRBA launches today the newest version of Data Center Intelligence (DCI).

DCI is more than a static capacity planning tool useful only for the first P2V migration phase: it monitors the virtual infrastructure on continuous basis and suggests the virtual machines best arrangement across virtualization hosts at any moment, depending on several factors that customers can specify with rules.

Depending on which rules an operator can write, DCI can suggest different placements, so the product may become complex to use in the proper way.
To accomplish the task in an easier way this new major release introduces a set of predefined and customizable analysis templates, including:

• Financial Analysis 
  DCI 5.0 introduces integrated financial analysis by enabling the results of an analysis to be directly inserted into any Excel-based financial model.  CiRBA 5.0 includes a default model that provides a comprehensive TCO/ROI calculation, factoring in both capital and operational savings, applying hardware, power, facilities and staff costs to analysis results to determine the true financial profile of each strategy being considered.
• Power Consumption Analysis 
  DCI 5.0 provides the ability to analyze both measured and estimated power draw for individual IT systems, and rolls these measures up to overall utilization for groups of servers and entire data centers.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Capacity Planning

One of the most valuable tool for virtualization is free and comes from Microsoft.
It's called Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP), it's a capacity planning product that supports hardware and application virtualization platforms, and it's able to agentlessly discover and take into account over 50,000 computers.

The version 3.0 released in April supports both Virtual Server 2005 R2 and Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid) 4.5.

The new version 3.1, now in private beta, is 64bit and supports Hyper-V.

Enroll for the beta program here.

Labels: Capacity Planning, Microsoft

Despite capacity planning is one of the most critical phases of any virtualization adoption project a limited number of customers know that VMware offers a solution for it.

The product, acquired by AOG in 2005, is called Capacity Planner and has a unique capability: after monitoring the workloads performance on physical servers it can compare them against a big database of known values so that customers can recognize if an application has an abnormal behavior before running a P2V migration.

The product is available only through the VMware partners, which have to purchase a license (which expires after six months) to use it at customers site.
Only some customers recognize the value of capacity planning and are glad to pay for it because the operation implies an investment just to understand if virtualization makes sense or not. So the consulting firms sometimes have a hard time to sell the service.

But VMware is about to dramatically change the process: virtualization.info has learned that Capacity Planner will be available free of charge starting on July 1st.

Partners will not be required to buy any license anymore (even if they will still have to attend a classroom course that doesn't come cheap). They will just have to login on the online portal, create a new profile and start monitoring the customer's infrastructure.
The data will stay online for six months and then will be archived.

This move will create serious problems to competing companies like CiRBA and Novell (through PlateSpin) which obviously target the VMware customers.
It's very likely that these companies will shift their focus on Microsoft and Citrix audience very soon.

Labels: Capacity Planning, VMware

After securing $12 million in a second round of investments, the Canadian company CiRBA is back with a minor update of its capacity planning tool Data Center Intelligence (DCI).

Despite the number assignment DCI 4.6 has some major new features like:

• Selective workload analysis
  The product is able to analyze multiple workloads running on the same server through the most relevant benchmarking systems. This improves the overall capability to recognize good candidates for P2V migrations
• Performance impact analysis
  The product is able to calculate the risk of negatively affecting application performance after the server consolidation
• iSCSI impact analysis
  The product is able to calculate the impact of iSCSI protocol on the physical CPUs in those virtualization hosts not using TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE) NICs
• Network Latency Analysis
  The product now tracks the network latency on the physical environment and compares it with the one expected in the virtualization host

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Capacity Planning

One of the most complex tasks in any virtualization project is recognizing the best candidates for P2V migrations and correctly mixing their workloads into the new virtualization hosts. virtualization.info rates the capacity planning as the third biggest challenge in virtualization adoption since 2007.

A very limited amount of competitors offer products in this space: VMware (with its Capacity Planner), Novell (with PlateSpin PowerRecon) and CiRBA (with its Data Center Intelligence).
Available through monthly subscriptions or as part of consulting services, all these tools are not exactly cheap: the immediate result is that the assessment phase significantly impacts on the overall virtualization project budget discouraging several companies from doing a proper capacity planning.

A free of charge alternative surprisingly comes from Microsoft which never advertised the product: Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP).

Originally published in February 2008, Microsoft seems to do everything to hide this critical tool despite its great flexibility:

• Support for Virtual Server 2005 R2, Application Virtualization 4.5 (formerly SoftGrid) and the upcoming Hyper-V 1.0
• Support for domain and workgroup machines agentless discovery (with multiple login account credentials) or import list
• Support for multiple companies or departments
• Support for multiple format reporting

As expected in any capacity planning tool, MAP first has to discover the physical machines available on the network, and then start tracking their performances over a customizable period of time. Once the analysis is completed the user can generate a report revealing which servers are good candidates for virtualization and which workloads can be mixed together.

Unlike other products mentioned above, MAP is not able to coordinate a P2V migration accordingly to the reports or to continuously track the virtual machines performance after the migration to suggest workloads rearrangements, but provides more than enough features to address most capacity planning needs.
Its price makes it a valuable tool to consider for any project.

Download MAP here.

Labels: Capacity Planning, Microsoft

Quoting from the CiRBA official announcement:

CiRBA Inc., a leader in Data Center Intelligence software, today announced that it has raised $12 million in its second round of institutional funding led by Sigma Partners. Existing investors including Edgestone Capital Partners and others also participated in the round. The funding will enable CiRBA to further accelerate growth on a global scale, with investments in sales, marketing and product development...

Labels: Capacity Planning

The canadian startup CiRBA goes beyond growth announcement, releasing Data Center Intelligence (DCI) 4.5.

In this release CiRBA introduces a single main new feature called Proactive Resource Placement, which forecasts workload patterns inside tracked virtual machines looking at their history (back to years). Once workloads projection are calculated, DCI 4.5 can interact with VMware VirtualCenter to proactively move virtual machines on those virtualization hosts granting them the biggest and safest room to grow.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Capacity Planning

Quoting from the Surgient official announcement:

Surgient, the leader in Virtual Lab Management Applications for software testing, training and evaluation, today announced that it achieved record growth in the third quarter of 2007. With a record number of new deals in the third quarter, including the company's first seven figure license deal, Surgient is on pace for 60 percent year-over-year revenue growth. Surgient third quarter bookings grew to almost three times the bookings for the same quarter in 2006.

Surgient signed several new customers, including Genesys Labs, Halliburton Landmark Graphics, Raymond James, Serena, Ultimate Software and Vontu. The company saw repeat business from BMC , CA , Dell, EMC, Information Builders, Kana and Target Corporation...

Quoting from the Cirba official announcement:

CiRBA Inc., a leader in Data Center Intelligence, today announced that 2007 marked a year of tremendous growth in the emerging virtualization and consolidation planning software market as server sprawl, space constraints and power consumption force enterprises to take a more holistic and critical view of their data centers. CiRBA highlights from 2007 include the release of CiRBA versions 4.0, 4.2, 4.4, and 4.5, customer growth of over 130%, a new European presence, key strategic partnerships, as well as the industry's most prestigious award recognitions...

Labels: Capacity Planning, Virtual Lab Automation

The canadian firm CiRBA, focused on capacity planning for large-scale infrastructures, released new version of its Data Center Intelligence (DCI) product.

In DCI 4.4 CiRBA introduces enhanced integration with VMware Infrastructure 3 plaftorm, allowing customers to maintain best virtual machines arrangement, and not only planning initial placement:

• VMware DRS Integration
  VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) determines motion paths for virtual machines based on workload balancing criteria, without consideration for the technical and business constraints used to determine virtual machine placement. While DRS supports affinity and anti-affinity rules to identify where systems should or shouldn’t reside, these rules must be developed and entered manually. CiRBA 4.4 enables organizations to analyze environments, factor in technical and business constraints, and automatically populate and synchronize VMware DRS rules.
• Virtualization Overhead Modeling
  The ability to accurately model workloads is critical to virtualization planning. Virtual machines create CPU overhead, and until now VMware customers had to rely on percentage-based estimates of those overhead levels. With Version 4.4, CiRBA enables organizations to accurately model VMware workloads including virtualization overhead by using an algorithm to automatically calculate CPU overhead by converting disk and network IO into projected CPU load.
• VMware VMotion Compatibility Analysis
  VMotion is a powerful capability that enables organizations to migrate virtual images between compatible servers without experiencing downtime. CiRBA has developed new rules that enable organizations to map where VMotion will and won’t work amongst servers they already own or intend to purchase.

CiRBA will release DCI 4.4 on end of September, with a licensing model based on monthly subscription.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Capacity Planning

Quoting from the CiRBA official announcement:

CiRBA Inc., a leader in Data Center Intelligence, today announced that it has expanded its presence into Europe, naming Ayman Gabarin as vice president of Europe, Middle East and Africa. Mr. Gabarin, who previously worked with CiRBA President and CEO Gerry Smith at Changepoint Corporation, will play a key role in helping to further develop CiRBA’s business, presence and relationships across Europe.

...

Ayman Gabarin has 20 years of experience in various business sectors including enterprise software and industrial services. Prior to CiRBA, Mr. Gabarin was the EMEA Vice President of IT Governance at Compuware Corporation. He also launched the EMEA business as Vice President for Changepoint Corporation, a leading provider of solutions for automating IT services delivery. As a member of Changepoint’s executive team, where he worked alongside Gerry Smith, Mr. Gabarin grew revenues to 30% of Changepoint’s global sales, resulting in the company’s 2004 acquisition by Compuware. Mr. Gabarin holds a Bachelor of Applied Science and Engineering degree from the University of Toronto...

Labels: Capacity Planning

Canadian company CiRBA, entered the virtualization space last year with a capacity planning solution for large scale deployments, releases a minor updated for its Data Center Intelligence (DCI).

DCI 4.2 mainly introduces some improvements in user interface and data acquisition, like:

• Agentless WMI Configuration and Performance Data Collection
• SNMP support for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Capacity Planning

The canadian CiRBA, recently entered in the virtualization market, just released version 4.0 of its Data Center Intelligence (DCI), covering an almost empty market segment: large-scale capacity planning for server consolidation.

New features of this release includes:

• Interactive Server Consolidation and Virtualization Analysis
  Capability to perform what-if analysis to compare different server consolidation scenarios.
• Enhanced VM Reporting Capabilities
  A new VMware Configuration report provides detailed configuration on a VMware ESX host server and its guest VMs.
• New licensing options
  Departmental edition targets organizations that want to analyze for virtualization specifically and want to examine workload personalities only. The Enterprise edition suits those who want to analyze heterogeneous data centers and use multiple consolidation strategies considering configuration, workload and business constraints

CiRBA DCI 4.0 is available immediately, licensed on a monthly basis with pricing based on the number of server operating systems being audited and term of commitment.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

CiRBA has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

Labels: Capacity Planning