Virtualization: Management tool vendors wake up as well

Forget about making any cool interfaces for VMware's own product line. They are hiring developers like mad, and these folks will build their own UIs.

Silo-centric tools

Silo-centric application-performance management tools are available from BMC, CA and Compuware. Such tools focus on availability and capacity, and tend to be traditional server-management tools that have been enhanced to manage virtualized assets. For example, BMC's Performance Manager for Virtual Servers provides real-time monitoring for virtualized environments, and generates events when critical availability and performance thresholds are exceeded.

After discovering all virtual machines, the tool maps them to their physical hosts, BMC's Fomin says. "You can see that this virtual machine is associated with that host, and you can see that it's part of this resource pool. You can look at a resource-pool or cluster point of view, and from each layer you can see what's happening from a capacity point of view," he says.

CA's Introscope Web-application performance-monitoring tool tracks the performance of Web applications in virtual server environments. "Introscope monitors different tiers, including VMware, to get the transaction perspective, and to get metrics that show the health of each tier," says Mark Donsky, a CA product manager. "It can see spikes in performance as well as bottlenecks that show, for example, that usage is spiking and it's time to reconfigure the machine."

Read at NW.