Vendors scramble to rein in virtual environments

Embotics' V-Scout application connects to VMware VirtualCenter to track virtual machines across VMware environments. The software then automatically populates itself with custom data in VirtualCenter and generates reports on numerous metrics such as disk space used, CPU count and connection state. VKernel's SearchMyVM download provides a "Google-like" interface to search more than 75 attributes across virtual machines, hosts, clusters, storage, resource pools, files, snapshots, VMware tools, applications and configuration information.

Fortisphere released the second generation of its Virtual Essentials suite, which the vendor says enhances its policy-based management applications to help IT managers better understand how virtual resources are being used and maximize their investment. The software allows IT managers to set policies that would enable virtual resources to be decommissioned or reclaimed at a set time, preventing IT from deploying more resources when existing virtual machines are being under-utilized. Virtual Essentials 2.0 includes capacity planning capabilities, according to Fortisphere CTO and principal founder John Suit, which "let IT managers grow their virtual environments without doing it wastefully."

Industry watchers say enterprise IT executives are reaching the point where capacity planning will be a critical discipline to master in the virtual realm.

"The growing density of VMs and the increasing virtualization of mission-critical applications is causing many IT organizations to look anew at ways to do better resource planning," Gartner's Haight says. "There has been a general perception that platforms such as VMware can help alleviate potential performance problems so there has been less rigorous attention paid to traditional planning, but the environment is changing."