VMTurbo upgrade supports the three major virtualization platforms

Network World - VMTurbo has upgraded its operations management suite to support the three major virtual environments and to improve its capacity-planning tool.

With the new 3.0 version of Operations Manager, the software can now manage Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware's vSphere individually or in multi-hypervisor deployments, the company says. This version adds XenServer to its capabilities.

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In addition, the new version includes integration with VMware's vCloud Director management platform, which enables viewing and managing assets that fall under VMware's vCloud Director platform, applying Operations Manager's optimization and quality of service capabilities through vCloud Director.

For example, in a multi-tenant environment of a service provider or for a deployment using both public and private clouds, Operations Manager can now create a control layer for all those environments, essentially overseeing vCloud Director.

Also with the new version the software can gather data about performance of any Windows applications running on virtual desktops that Operations Manager oversees. It can prioritize these apps depending on how critical they are to the business.

VMTurbo has also boosted performance of its capacity planning within Operations Manger. Customers can map their network in the planning tool and plug in hypothetical new hardware to see how the virtual environment will perform. Before the software could make these plans based on CPU and memory only, but other factors such as network and storage I/O and network load balancing are added into the equation.

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Operations Manager can automate the addition and deletion of virtual machines as needed, but that need is defined not by static policies but by what will make the entire environment's resources and demands work most efficiently.

The company calls this approach market analysis and says it is an abstraction layer that makes decisions on how transactions are handled best. Factors this analysis includes is weighing where a workload will run more efficiently or less expensively, for example, the company says.

Indiana University uses VMTurbo as a way to get better visibility into its roughly 85 physical servers with nearly 2,000 virtual machines, says Robert Reynolds, the school's virtualization architect.

That is important because the university cuts its physical server utilization closer than a typical business would when it runs virtual machines, he says. Whereas corporations might seek to move VMs when 50% to 60% of physical server capacity was reached, but the university pushes that closer to 80%. With VM performance crashing about 94% utilization, that leaves little margin for error, he says.

That makes more efficient use of the virtual environment a plus, something that the VMTurbo market analysis can help with Reynolds says. It can better balance available memory across a VM cluster than VMware Dynamic Resource Scheduling, he says, although he doesn't always automate that optimization.

For example, the university wants certain applications to run on certain machines only, and wouldn't want Operations Manager to allow automatically migrating VMs from those machines, he says.

Reynolds says the management platform definitely frees up time for his virtualization team, effectively increasing his manpower. By ensuring efficient use of the university's hardware, it also helps keep infrastructure costs down, he says.

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