VKernel expands performance, capacity management on Microsoft Hyper-V

May 23, 2011

Recently, VKernel announced expanded support for Microsoft Hyper-V, adding updates to its VKernel Capacity Analyzer and VKernel Chargeback products. Beyond that, VKernel said its latest announcement marks the company's accelerating support for all things Microsoft. In addition to VKernel support for Hyper-V, the company's products are also integrating with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) through Microsoft certified management packs, and the company stated it will continue to work with Microsoft to further extend SCOM capabilities to both Hyper-V and VMware environments.

VKernel told InfoWorld that Microsoft has been a great partner in regard to this latest round of joint development. VKernel worked closely with the Windows Server and Hyper-V groups, as well as the System Center group, all the while finding Microsoft development teams to be very open and available. The company also found Microsoft extremely helpful with coordinating marketing and release announcements to the larger user community and said it looked forward to seeing more virtualization-focused marketing activities and events from Microsoft in the future.

[ Also on InfoWorld.com: Find out why Veeam has added backup and replication support for Microsoft Hyper-V. | Read about how Microsoft Hyper-V now supports Linux-based CentOS. | Keep up-to-date on virtualization by signing up for InfoWorld's Virtualization newsletter. ]

While VMware still owns the vast majority of the server virtualization market, VKernel believes that picture is starting to change. The company claims it's seeing Hyper-V implementations beginning to grow quickly. Therefore, VKernel is working to release features to help make this infrastructure growth quick and easy.

"Hyper-V momentum in the virtualization market is increasing for a number of reasons," said Alex Rosemblat, product marketing manager at VKernel. "One reason may stem from the fact that we have heard from customers for some time that they are wary of single sourcing their hypervisor, a mission-critical component for their infrastructure, from VMware. And VKernel released our first Hyper-V compatible product in 2009 to address this customer concern."

Rosemblat continued, "A second reason may be due to the latest releases of Windows Server and System Center that clearly show Microsoft's progress in developing enterprise virtualization solutions. And finally, VKernel's decision to increase development for Hyper-V comes as a result of the growing interest we are witnessing for Hyper-V. This increasing awareness has manifested itself in a number of areas, from analyst reports that note the growing adoption of Hyper-V, to increasing downloads of Hyper-V compatible VKernel products, and also from meeting Hyper-V only virtualization administrators at VMware user group meetings."

In terms of building the Hyper-V market, Rosemblat said he believes that VKernel can help accelerate Hyper-V adoption within a data center and across the industry through the confidence that his software provides scaling virtualization initiatives.

Dave Bartoletti, a senior analyst with the Taneja Group, seems to concur with VKernel's assessment of Microsoft Hyper-V's market movement. Bartoletti notes that virtualization ecosystem partners like VKernel are beefing up support for Hyper-V because of two main drivers: Customers are beginning to see Hyper-V as a mature (production-ready) hypervisor platform and are asking for multiplatform support, and the management ecosystem players need to differentiate their offerings from SCOM/SCVMM and the vCenter suite.

Bartoletti added, "Two years ago, it was Xen support everyone touted -- I think the recent move to add value to Hyper-V signals that Microsoft is clearly making inroads as a production-ready and feature-rich platform."

Source: http://www.infoworld.com/d/virtualization/vkernel-expands-performance-capacity-management-microsoft-hyper-v-822?source=rss_infoworld_blogs

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