Networking

PlateSpin's PowerRecon is a planning and monitoring application for organizations with a high number of servers and virtual host targets. On the surface, PowerRecon looks similar to traditional network monitoring/management applications that track application inventory, connectivity and network usage.

We like it, however, for what's underneath, which is a very useful server monitoring, planning and management tool (especially for VM hosts and instances) that can be coupled with PlateSpin's PowerConvert tool, which does a formidable job of moving server instances from physical to virtual and all the variations the virtual data center affords us today.

PowerRecon also has chargeback features that monitor and levy costs based on actual system uptime, CPU utilization, processor speed, memory used, network bandwidth used, and disk storage (space, speed and number of writes per second). By contrast, Virtugo's virtualSuite uses a patented, contrived metric for chargeback accounting purposes.

We were also impressed with PowerRecon's ability to work with a huge number of VM operating system candidates, including Windows NT 4 and XP through current Windows Server products (support for XP and Win 2003 Enterprise Server were tested and affirmed), most modern versions of Red Hat and SUSE Linux (Red Hat Enterprise 5 was tested) and Sun's Solaris 7 (Sparc) and Solaris versions 8-10 (Sparc and Intel/AMD). VM hosts can be running VMware ESX (tested), Citrix Systems' XenServer Enterprise Edition, Virtual Iron and/or Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005.