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 the 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.
Until now many organizations were slow to adapt internal chargeback because of the expense and time to implement. Now both reasons have been addressed. At only $199 per CPU socket organizations can now allocate costs to users based on the resources they consume and proactively manage capacity.
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 enablement for scalability.
VKernel reports on all resources – CPU, Network, Memory, 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 could 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.
"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" said Rick Vanove, CNET product reviewer.
"Given the underlying complexity of chargeback issues, it is remarkable that VKernel is so easy to use – just add hosts 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."
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.