VKernel is announcing a new free product called AppVIEW. AppVIEW will monitor up to 5 VMs within a virtual infrastructure. AppVIEW doesn't care what applications you have installed (which you may think based on the name) but it's measuring the utilization of particular VMs to help better fit your environment. The goal of the product is to monitor the resource allocation to your 5 most critical VMs, find hidden performance constraints, and examine performance of virtualized applications. If you have a web application that once ran on a dedicated physical server and is now a virtualized application experiencing performance issues, the only thing that changed is the virtualization layer, and 9 times out of 10, it's related to some sort of capacity constraint.
VKernel AppVIEW is a small 2mb installation and works with any size infrastructure. If you read my blog on VKernel Capacity View and took the two minutes to install it, you saw that Capacity View gives a good amount of generic information, but details are missing to help alleviate issues. This is one spot where VKernel AppVIEW breaks that boundary.
- Any size infrastructure can benefit. If you have a standalone free ESXi box or a 100 host farm with 10000 VMs, install this app on a VM or desktop, and get going.
- VMware admin or Application admin. If you're a VMware admin or a particular application administrator, choose the 5 VMs that are important to "you". SAP, Exchange, SQL, Peoplesoft, etc.
- AppVIEW holds 30 days of data. Most free products only get a 5 minute refresh or 24 hours worth of data. AppVIEW can update it's stats every 5 minutes up to an hour. This 30 day period allows you to look at your history to see utilization to properly configure your VMs.
- Green, Orange, or Red. A green check mark will let you know the VM has been configured correctly. An orange exclamation usually indicates that you are wasting resources. A red exclamation mark will alert you that there is some work to be done.
- Four key pieces of performance criteria. Mouse over an icon on any day and view the diagnostic data. AppVIEW looks at four pieces of proper Optimization and Capacity for VM configuration: CPU, Memory, Storage Resources, and Disk I/O.
- CPU: Wasted or Over-utilized by percentage on number of vCPUs. Why is this important? Is the proper processing power being allocated to our 5 most important VMs?
- Memory: Wasted or Over-utilized by percentage on amount of RAM. Why is this important? Intel Nehalem and AMD processors that use large pages have poor Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) performance. A VM configured with 4GB of RAM is going to always use close to 4GB on the host. Correctly sizing VMs with newer hardware will allow better consolidation ratios and more VMs per host.
- Storage Resources: Wasted or Over-utilized by percentage on amount of GB storage allocation. Why is this important? Not everybody has Thin Provisioning in their storage environment. Verify VMs aren't taking up more space than necessary.
- Disk I/O: Average Latency in milliseconds. Why is this important? Underlying slow disk performance can be more detrimental to VM performance than any other criteria. Analyzing disk I/O can point you to potential problems with disks in your storage array, the type of performance drive used for the VM needs to be changed (SATA, SAS, FC, SSD), or perhaps the medium of transfer needs to be analyzed (iSCSI, NFS, FiberChannel)
- Easy access to VKernel Software. If you don't want to take on the task of reconfiguring your VMs, or if you have way to many VMs to reconfigure, you're one click away from VKernal's Optimization Pack and Capacity Analyzer
Screen shot of production VI:
Screen shot of Lab VI running on 500GB of Local SATA storage:
AppVIEW:
