VKernel, the award-winning provider of enterprise-class capacity and performance management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, announced today updates to its VKernel Capacity Analyzer with Hyper-V and VKernel Chargeback with Hyper-V products. Available today, these new versions provide the fast-growing Hyper-V market with robust performance monitoring, capacity planning, and chargeback capabilities needed to successfully manage applications in virtualized environments.

As Hyper-V implementations scale up, applications can sometimes experience performance issues if too many virtual machines are chasing too few resources. Effective capacity planning and performance monitoring can help avoid these issues. However, assessing available capacity and identifying resource constraints becomes increasingly challenging as environments grow. Additionally, without adequate chargeback or showback capabilities, VM sprawl can dramatically increase costs for virtualized environments.

The latest releases of VKernel Capacity Analyzer with Hyper-V and VKernel Chargeback with Hyper-V are designed to provide virtualization administrators with enhanced performance monitoring, capacity planning and chargeback capabilities for managing their virtual environments. Through close development with Microsoft, these two updated VKernel applications now support capacity management and chargeback operations on Hyper-V VMs that have been deployed as virtual hard drives (VHDs) on cluster shared volume (CSV)-enabled Hyper-V hosts. Both Capacity Analyzer and Chargeback with Hyper-V are powered by VKernel’s patent-pending Capacity Analytics Engine and can be installed in 20 minutes as virtual machines on a Hyper-V host.

In addition to VKernel support for Hyper-V, VKernel products integrate with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) through Microsoft certified management packs. VKernel is continuing to work with Microsoft to extend SCOM capabilities to both Hyper-V and VMware environments.

“VKernel’s enhanced Hyper-V support provides robust capacity management capabilities for our fast-growing Hyper-V customer base,” said Mike Schutz, Senior Director, Windows Server and Virtualization, Microsoft Corporation. “Capacity management and chargeback capabilities are important to customers, and we are excited to be working with VKernel in this area.”

“This is the first of many upcoming enhancements for the growing Hyper-V user base,” said Eric Jackson, VP of Product Management, VKernel. “Cluster shared volumes have allowed Hyper-V implementations to become more robust and flexible, and we’re pleased to support this hypervisor capability with capacity management and chargeback. As Hyper-V implementations continue on the growth trend we’re seeing, VKernel looks forward to expanding support for Hyper-V and System Center Operations Manager.”

General Availability
VKernel Capacity Analyzer with Hyper-V 4.4 and Chargeback with Hyper-V 2.6 are available for a 30-day free trial from http://www.vkernel.com/resources/technology/hyper-v. Pricing starts at $299 per socket per application.