virtualization.info

After releasing Capacity Modeler to counter the new VMware CapacityIQ, last week VKernel released another free tool to keep the virtualization community engaged.

This one is called Capacity View. It is an extremely simple dashboard for Windows that summarizes the virtual infrastructure elements (data centers, clusters, hosts, virtual machines, resource pools, data stores), the resources allocation (both physical and virtual) and the amount of alerts that VMware vCenter is raising at any given moment.

The approach is quite brilliant: under each alert group (Performance Problems, Available Capacity and Over-allocated Resources) there’s a link to a relevant product that VKernel sells.
Many administrators may desire to monitor the virtual infrastructure with this single-window, essential console during the day, jumping on the fully-featured vCenter control panel only when it’s truly needed.
And while they may have no interest in the other VKernel products, there’s a daily reminder that those products exist under their nose. This is more than enough to develop a strong brand awareness and instill doubt that those products may be actually useful.

Labels: Capacity Planning, Releases, VKernel

If your major partner becomes your major competitor then its major competitor becomes your major partner. This is what VKernel must be thinking since the launch of VMware CapacityIQ.

Just two weeks ago the startup first released a free product called Capacity Modeler to attract more potential customers and show them the (claimed) superiority over CapacityIQ.
Now the company announces a new beta for its flagship Capacity Analyzer, stressing that it supports Microsoft Hyper-V. VKernel also clarifies that its other products will support Hyper-V as well.

It is not that the current strategy is turning VMware into a less independent vendor. It is that the current strategy is turning the VMware partners into a less dependent ecosystem.

Labels: Capacity Planning, Microsoft, VKernel

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

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

VKernel made a big progress in the last few months. It culminated with a Round B investment of $7 million, which is not exactly easy to get during a worldwide financial crisis.

Along with its product portfolio and its executive leadership, also its popularity is rapidly expanding.
In face the company reported yesterday a 260% growth in new customers acquisition in H1 2009 compared to the previous year.

As the virtual infrastructures grow in complexity the customers realize the need for a chargeback solution and the VKernel flagship product sales skyrocket.
It must be seen if this trend will continue as soon as their partner VMware will turn into a competitor by releasing its own chargeback product that was announced in January.

Labels: VKernel

After securing its second round of funds in May, VKernel is ready to grow and attack the market with a more articulated sales structure.

To do so the startup hired a new Vice President of Product Management and Marketing: Kevin Conklin.

Conklin comes from Mazu Networks, acquired by Riverbed Technology, where he was VP of Marketing as well.

Labels: Leadership, VKernel

A couple of weeks ago VKernel, the hyperactive US startup that launched in October 2007, secured a second round of funding: $7 million provided by Longworth Venture Partners, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Polaris Venture Partners.

The previous round, dated was led by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Polaris Venture Partners for as much as $4.6 million in February 2008.

As result, the VKernel board of directors welcomes a couple of new members: Nilanjana Bhowmik, Partner at Longworth Venture Partners, and Doug McNary, the former CEO of Onaro (acquired by NetApp in 2008).

Labels: Funding, VKernel

A few weeks ago VKernel has released version 4.0 of its Capacity Analyzer.

The product is now able to analyze the root cause for any vCPU, vRAM and vHDs problems, and provide resolution recommendations:

VKernel Capacity Analyzer 4.0 is available starting at $199 per socket.

Labels: Performance Monitoring, Releases, VKernel

VKernel continues to release little, useful and often free tools for the virtualization community, mimicking the successful marketing approach of Veeam in its early days.

This time the startup launches SnapshotMyVM, a simple utility to automatically document the details (and the performance history) of any VMware Infrastructure 3.5 virtual machine.

The product interacts with vCenter and allows the administrator to select one or more VMs at the same time.
As soon as the process starts, SnapshotMyVM collects all the VM details and populates a report that can be manually modified to improve its accuracy and then exported in XML format.

At that point the report can be imported inside Microsoft Excel or any other tool that can read and manipulate XML sources:

Documenting a virtual infrastructure can be a real pain and today there are a very limited number of solutions available on the market to address the need.
So SnapshotMyVM certainly is worth a check.

Download it for free here.

Labels: Releases, VKernel

VKernel released yesterday a couple of minor updates for its performance monitor Capacity Analyzer and its chargeback tracker Chargeback.

Capacity Analyzer 3.1 doesn’t include any relevant new feature while Chargeback 1.4 adds the capability to track unexpected runtime errors in the UI and additional currencies for the reports.

Labels: Chargeback, Performance Monitoring, VKernel

The frenetic activity of VKernel in the last months seems to have repaid the US startup.

Today the company reports the results of its first year of activity:

• 164% revenue increase in Q4 2008
• 100 paying customers
• 8,000 products downloads

It’s certainly a good result considering the current economy, but VKernel may find a hard time to keep these results in 2009, as VMware is entering the chargeback and performance analysis segments where the startup is focusing.

Labels: VKernel

VKernel continues its arguable policy of releasing major updates for its products in short amount of time, so this week we passed from Capacity Analyzer 2.1 to 3.0 after just one month and a half.

At least this time the new feature is consistent: the new Capacity Analyzer is able to recognize a performance bottleneck no more just at the host level but also inside any given virtual machine.

Of course the VKernel predictive engine works at this level as well, telling which VMs are going to perform bad and when.

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

Labels: Releases, VKernel

The startup VKernel continues its fast and furious release schedule. Last week was the turn of its free virtual appliance for virtual data center indexing and search: SearchMyVM.

The product hit 1.0 beta in September and now it’s already promoted to 2.0.
The only new feature included is the capability to export the query results in .CSV format.

The VKernel naming convention is very questionable. It seems that the company is trying to reach a high build number as fast as possible before the arrival of its first competitor in this space: Hyper9.

Unfortunately the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap tracks the release schedule of many companies in the market, highlighting which one makes ambiguous progresses.

Labels: Releases, VKernel

The startup VKernel is definitively full of resources, both in terms of development effort and ideas.

The company just launched an interesting website called CompareMyVM, where it hopes to collect from the community how many virtual resources are allocated for a certain workloads.

Analyzing the (anonymously) submitted data, VKernel aims at benchmarking the typical approach that virtualization professionals take when deploying new virtualized applications.

The website also allows to rate and vote each submitted configuration so that CompareMyVM can easily turn into a recommendation engine for virtualization newcomers.

In some ways this is something similar to the new Benchmarking Service that Google introduced in its Analytics tool: by submitting anonymous statistics the website owners can cooperate in measuring the average performance of several web categories and check where their website is positioned.

The difficult part will be keeping the community engaged and provide enough details about each submitted configuration to make it relevant for others.

Labels: VKernel

Just one month after hitting version 2.0, VKernel is ready to deliver a new minor update for its Capacity Analyzer (formerly Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer).

The only new thing is the capability to schedule the generation and delivery of the reports.

It’s clear that VKernel is still enjoying the startup phase of its corporate life, when new features are added as soon as customers demand for them and the product releases can be up to one every month.
This approach of course makes happy the early adopters and supporters, but may scare away big prospects.
The fast and furious release schedule will certainly end up as soon as the company reaches a critical mass.

Download a trial of Capacity Analyzer 2.1 here.

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

Labels: Releases, VKernel

Three months after the first technical preview, VKernel is ready to release its new Capacity Analyzer (formerly Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer) 2.0.

Despite the major release number the product doesn’t seem to have any groundbreaking new feature.
Anyway VKernel included new Disk I/O statistics and enriched the user interface.

Download a trial here.

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

Labels: VKernel

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

The US startup VKernel, focused on performance monitor and chargeback, has just launched the first beta of a free tool called SearchMyVM.

The product will index over 75 attributes for any supported virtual infrastructure (VMware only at the moment), including virtual machines, hosts, clusters, storage, resource pools, snapshots and more.
Customers will be able to search for any of them through a minimal interface that mimics Google.

For large-scale deployments administrators the product is definitively interesting and, on paper, may disturb the work of another startup, Hyper9 (formerly InovaWave), that is developing something similar.

Enroll for the beta program here.

Labels: VKernel