By Dave Simpson
– Akorri this week released the 3.0 version of its BalancePoint software, which the company describes as a cross-domain "virtual infrastructure performance and capacity management tool," although the software can also be used in physical environments.
Most of the enhancements in BalancePoint 3.0 involve analysis focused on VMs and clusters, but on the storage front Akorri added support for SAN switches from Brocade and Cisco. The SAN Switch Analysis feature allows administrators to locate over-used and unused ports in order to help balance SAN traffic throughput.
Most of the rest of the enhancements in BalancePoint 3.0 relate to optimizing performance of VMs. For example, a VM Performance Index provides analytics for the VM layer that allow administrators to determine whether their VMs are "right-sized" for a given workload, according to Rich Corley, Akorri's founder and CTO. Based on the resulting graphs, administrators can re-configure VMs to optimize performance.
A Virtual Host Resource Contention tool examines host CPU and memory utilization from the VM perspective, enabling users to re-allocate CPUs and/or memory to balance VM workloads. This tool can also be used to assist in VMware entitlement settings.
A Virtual Resource Entitlement Analysis module in BalancePoint 3.0 identifies configuration and capacity issues to assist in improving resource allocation settings for VMs. And a VM CPU Efficiency analysis tool enables administrators to troubleshoot VM CPU problems, and compares the guest operating system perspective with actual VM usage.
Finally, Akorri added management, optimization and planning functionality for Microsoft's physical server clusters and VMware's virtual server clusters from both a server and storage perspective.
BalancePoint falls into a product category that the Taneja Group research and consulting firm refers to as virtual infrastructure optimization (VIO). In addition to Akorri, Taneja includes the following vendors/products in the VIO category: NetApp's SANscreen VM Insight and Virtual Instruments' upcoming (in the fourth quarter) VirtualWisdom platform, which is based on the company's NetWisdom platform.
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