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Q&A: Exploring VMTurbo and the New Operations Manager 3.0 Virtualization and Cloud Management Solution

VMTurbo recently launched version 3.0 of its award-winning platform, VMTurbo Operations Manager 3.0.  To find out more, I spoke with Yuri Rabover, the company's co-founder and VP of product strategy.   Here is that conversation:

VMblog.com:  Can you tell us a little bit about VMTurbo and how the company was founded?

Yuri Rabover:  VMTurbo delivers an intelligent workload management solution for cloud and virtualized environments with the goal of helping customers get the most out of - and continue to expand - their virtualization deployment. The founding team of VMTurbo came from SMARTS, an innovator in system and network root cause analysis solutions (acquired by EMC in 2004). The core founding team started VMTurbo in 2009, realizing that the rapid growth of virtualization in the datacenter was redefining the management requirements for companies of all sizes. VMTurbo is backed by Bain Capital Ventures and Highland Capital Partners. Today, the company is headquartered in Massachusetts, with offices in New York, California, United Kingdom and Israel.  

VMblog.com:  What does your company mean when it talks about "intelligent workload management"?

Rabover:  We believe that intelligent workload management provides an opportunity to profoundly change the way datacenters are managed - one that is based on system intelligence as a whole and leverages the fluidity that virtualization provides to continuously tune the environment and assure application performance while also utilizing the underlying resources as efficiently as possible. It's not about threshold management, predictive analytics, alert suppression and root cause diagnostics. It's about intelligently preventing problems from occurring in the first place - by optimizing and removing contention across the entire environment.

VMblog.com:  So what's the secret to doing this right?  How does VMTurbo pull it off?

Rabover:  The essential question IT is trying to solve for in a virtual environment is: how do I assure and prioritize application performance while also getting the absolute most out of my shared physical resources? Answering this is obviously not a static proposition; it's constantly evolving as demand fluctuates. Our solution takes a fundamentally different approach to solving for it - one that does not focus on threshold management for the thousands of control points in a complex virtualized datacenter. Instead, we represent the IT environment as a market - where the physical resources (storage, compute, memory, network I/O) are represented as "supply" and the virtual workloads and applications that run within them are represented as "demand". When you look at the IT environment this way, and allow for the market to "self-level" based on availability of budget and supply, you make better decisions about what workload to run where, and how to continuously tune the environment to avoid resource contention and performance problems. This mirrors how buyers continuously seek better prices and suppliers strive to maximize profit in a free market. These decisions are entirely automatable because you are addressing potential issues before the environment is stressed. It also provides a better way to perform what-if scenarios as operators, architects and application owners assess virtualizing critical applications, adding new users or upgrading server hardware.

VMblog.com:  Your company recently announced version 3.0 of its platform, what are the new features in this release that people need to be aware of?

Rabover:  The new capabilities in VMTurbo Operations Manager 3.0 include:

1.     Cloud-scale management through VMware vCloud Director integration.  vCloud Director (vCD) enables the consolidation of virtual infrastructure across multiple clusters or virtual datacenters in a multi-tenant environment. Our product is able to manage resource allocations within these datacenters and across the vCD topology, ensuring application performance and avoiding the oversubscription and resource contention that often occurs with the added layer of abstraction that vCloud Director creates in large-scale environments.

2.     Single-instance, multi-hypervisor management by adding Citrix XenServer support and providing IT operators with the unique ability to manage performance and control configuration across XenServer, vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V environments from a single console.

3.     Application-aware service assurance that now discovers and profiles Windows applications across the virtual environment providing visibility into application performance and enabling IT operators to prioritize resource requirements for critical applications - ensuring quality of service as demand fluctuates.

4.     Enhanced, intelligent capacity planning which utilizes the product's deep understanding of workload performance characteristics and the physical environment to conduct performance-based capacity analysis.

VMblog.com:  What are some of the biggest management challenges that enterprises are currently facing in their data centers?

Rabover:  Across the board our customers tell us that too many cycles are spent finding and trying to fix discrete performance problems, instead of preventing them in the first place. Determining the proper reaction to problems in a virtualized environment is very complex after the fact. Threshold-based management only exacerbates the problem - even if the thresholds are "intelligent" or "predictive" as many solutions purport. It requires a high degree of skill and domain knowledge and is very difficult to automate. Enlightened IT operators understand that virtualization provides the fluidity required to prevent contention and performance issues, but it also requires a different approach to management.  When done correctly, virtualization is automatable and places control back into the hands of customers by intelligently tuning the configuration of the virtual environment to provide application assurance and avoid resource contention.

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Once again, thank you to Yuri Rabover, co-founder and VP of product strategy at VMTurbo, for taking time out to speak with VMblog.com.

Published Friday, February 17, 2012 6:08 AM by David Marshall
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