Empowered Networks

Virtualization Tools

Managing virtualization is a new area with new products coming onto the market almost daily.  We test new offering in our in-house lab before recommending anything to our customers.  We have tested and recommended the following products:

• Virtual Assurance from CA Technologies - a virtual server performance management solution that lets you see all the virtual servers running in the data center and monitor them for faults and performance related issues. We like that it comes as an appliance so installations are simple. A second key benefit is that it requires much less licensing than traditional monitoring tools because agents are only required on a few real servers as opposed to all virtual servers that are being monitored. The graphical interface is really nice and reports can be exported. This product will be of value to customers who want better visibility into their Virtual Server Farm.
• Virtual Automation from CA Technologies - a slick new virtual server reservation software application that allows departments to build out their own virtual servers through a self-reservation portal. We like the ease of use: users login, lease computer time in the data center, run the application they need. When the lease expires the computing resources are automatically returned to the data center users can be charged by IT for the amount of resources consumed, and/or for the time period those resources were used. A great way to manage computing costs and charge-backs.
• Netuitive - a self-learning analytics engine that supercharges your performance management systems.  It recognizes that managing systems, business services or virtual infrastructures with conventional rule and script-based monitoring tools is humanly impossible. We like how Netuitive replaces the labour-intensive and error-prone manual setting of performance baselines and thresholds with self-learning and continuously adaptive automated mathematics and analysis. We also see how it’s self-learning of your environment’s normal operating characteristics can help forecasts issues before they impact performance, and isolate root causes wherever problems occur which can result in reduced mean time to repair.
• Netutive for VMware is a VMware virtual server performance management system that takes the guesswork out of managing virtual environments by discovering all ESX servers, and then continuously analyzes and correlates live streaming data from both physical and virtual resources to forecast performance issues and pinpoint their root causes. With Netuitives certified integration with VMWare’s Virtual Center,  performance management becomes automated, freeing staff to focus on the more complex issues and/or on meeting new performance requirements.