As organizations move to virtualized production data centers shared by many departments, providing a painless method for monitoring capacity, resource usage and recovering cost is a pressing issue. VMware identifies chargeback as one of the key impediments to growth of virtualization in the data center. Customers simply don’t know how they will justify, pay for and recover the millions of dollars from business users needed to buy new hardware.
VKernel eliminates the pain from the chargeback process. Designed as a "plug and play" virtual appliance, the company’s offering is the first virtual appliance certified by VMware to meter resource usage by departments and automatically generate chargeback and capacity reports. The VKernel virtual appliance requires no installation and becomes operational in minutes after downloading.
VKernel tightly integrates with VMware’s Virtual Center and automatically updates itself when changes are made to Folders, Resource Pools and Clusters. This integration frees Administrators from having to keep the appliance in synch with the virtual environment – a huge savings in time and an enablement for scalability.
VKernel reports on all resources – CPU, Network, Memory and Storage. Additionally, customers can even add their own custom fields for chargeback. Costs such as license fees, cooling and electricity are just some examples of what a chargeback report might include.
After extensive beta testing with over 800 organizations worldwide, Release 1.0 of VKernel’s Virtual Appliance for Chargeback and Capacity Reporting is now available for download from company’s website at www.vkernel.com.
VKernel feedback has been very positive.
"Given the underlying complexity of chargeback issues, it is remarkable that VKernel is so easy to use – just add business services and reports are generated automatically. It was so easy to use it I thought I was doing something wrong,"
said Craig Wedge from AMSA, one of the early beta users. "I could not believe that getting capacity reports like this was that easy."
"Accurate chargeback is an important capability in any virtual environment, to allow IT to measure and recover its real costs from business owners. Even if IT is not actively recovering costs, it still needs these metrics for capacity planning, resource balancing, and maybe more importantly, to deal with the difficult politics of virtualization. Business owners need to know they are getting their "fair share of the pie," and solutions like VKernel let IT show business owners the value they are providing with virtualization."
- Andi Mann, Enterprise Management Associates.
"The VKernel appliance functioned well in the appliance model right from downloading from vkernel.com. I was very satisfied with the ease of use and the visibility it provided to the virtual infrastructure." - Rick Vanover, CNET product reviewer.
This efficiency is not surprising, since the people behind VKernel are not only experts in virtualization technology, but are known for creating automated, efficient IT reporting in other technology domains.
Alex Bakman, founder and CEO of V-Kernel, is a successful serial entrepreneur and holds numerous domestic and international patents. He founded Ecora Software (1999), an industry leader in cost-effective change and configuration reporting software with over 3,600 customers. Prior to this he founded Cleversoft (1994), a leader in monitoring solutions for Lotus Notes, which was subsequently acquired by Candle Corporation. His companies have all specialized in producing enhanced management reporting solutions that in spite of their underlying sophistication are quite easy to deploy and use.
Alex has brought on an experienced team of managers from companies such as CA, EMC, Candle, Cleversoft, CGI Group and Ecora.
Companies of any size can use the VKernel appliance. It works equally well in a small environment with just a few ESX hosts and scales to companies with hundreds of hosts. The product proves invaluable allowing organizations to chargeback internal customers just as easily as external. ISPs, hosting providers, and outsourcers will be able to chargeback their clients based on the actual consumption of resources.
VKernel can be downloaded at www.vkernel.com. Pricing is CPU-Socket based at $299/CPU Socket.