Start-Up VKernel Introduces Virtual Appliance to Find Capacity Bottleneck Issues

VKernel Corporation, a provider of virtual appliances for managing virtual server environments, announced today its Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer Virtual Appliance, which immediately identifies current and future capacity bottlenecks to ensure the performance of VMware ESX environments.

VKernel’s patent-pending technology continuously monitors CPU, memory, and storage utilization trends in VMware ESX environments across hosts, clusters, and resource pools. By utilizing VKernel’s quick-to-install virtual appliance model, users can eliminate current capacity bottlenecks and future ones through a simple, single-screen management dashboard. User will also have detailed capacity information to properly plan for the addition of new hosts, clusters, and resource pools.

“At the velocity organizations are virtualizing their server environments, IT groups must proactively monitor and eliminate their capacity bottlenecks or they risk facing serious downtime and performance issues,” said Alex Bakman, founder and CEO of VKernel. “With our Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer Virtual Appliance, we are empowering IT staff with a very simple and easyto- learn UI from which they can instantly identify their most critical bottleneck problems and take proactive measures against predicted future bottlenecks.”

By properly managing capacity bottlenecks, organizations can increase performance and significantly reduce downtime problems that lead to escalating business and IT costs and negative perceptions of virtualization within business units. The real challenge for IT staffs is finding a solution that helps them manage their capacity bottlenecks without wasting countless man-hours sifting through hundreds of VMware’s VirtualCenter reports. In minutes, the VKernel capacity bottleneck Analyzer can be deployed to show a three-dimensional (CPU, memory, storage) view of where capacity bottlenecks are today and where problems are predicted to occur. Users can customize their own capacity thresholds and receive alerts via email and SNMP.

“Before using VKernel in my environment, I had no idea what capacity was available on any of my hosts. It used to be a trial and error exercise to allocate virtual machines where we thought it was best to put them,” said Matthew Hadfield, senior systems engineer at Qirx. “Since implementing Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer, I have already saved a significant amount of time by being able to see at-a-glance where it would be best to add new virtual machines and keep my environment running at optimum performance.”

The VKernel Suite of Virtual Appliances for Systems Management VKernel’s suite of virtual appliances is actively changing the systems management approach to match the speed at which organizations are adding virtual machines by providing quick-to-install solutions with a near-zero learning curve. The VKernel suite of virtual appliances for systems management shares a single, common database to avoid redundant network discoveries and auto-synchronizes with VMware’s VirtualCenter to continually update hosts, clusters, and resource pools in a truly dynamic environment. In addition to the Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer, VKernel offers its Chargeback/Cost Visibility Virtual Appliance that meters actual resource usage to show resource consumption by departments and how much it costs.

The VKernel Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer Virtual Appliance is currently available as a Beta trial download. The full production version of this VKernel virtual appliance will be available by March 31, 2008.

VKernel Corporation