Virtualization Technology News and Information
Article
RSS
Heroix Offers Innovative Capacity Planning for VMware Users

Heroix, developer of application performance and network monitoring software, today announced that its Longitude VMware virtualization solution has added an innovative capacity planner along with new reporting capabilities to create a faster, easier, and more affordable method to monitor and manage virtual environments.

With the V7.2 release, Longitude can help enterprises solve the multiple challenges of VM sprawl, overprovisioning, and excess use of resources, practices that drive up IT budgets unnecessarily. The software, which now provides easy-to-use capacity planning along with expanded reporting, was designed specifically as a powerful tool to aid VMware users in making better decisions about deploying or retiring VMs, or moving them quickly to different hosts to maintain high service levels.

Longitude now has a novel, easy-to-use drag and drop facility that helps virtualization or system administrators make instant decisions about optimal deployment of virtual machine (VM) resources. Other monitoring or planning software typically requires multiple, manual steps that use valuable IT staff time or require several different software modules to perform a single assessment of the virtual environment.

A key addition to Longitude is capacity planning, where users can perform “what if” analyses to determine where and how potential changes would affect operations. Through this analysis, users can change any number of factors – CPU capacity, memory, disk, hosts, workloads moving to different hosts, and more – and see the results in easy-to-read graphs well before any changes occur. Longitude lets administrators dynamically understand the effects of change and make decisions to continue high levels of service. The drag and drop facility significantly increases the speed at which different scenarios can be examined.

“Our goal was to make an even better monitoring, reporting, and management option for the valuable data that Longitude provides. Now, users can understand their virtual environment much quicker and make changes in their resources faster. There is no need for a painstaking method of navigating to different pages in the monitoring tool or using multiple pop-up menus to get to the final information. These new capabilities give Heroix customers the ability to make effective virtual resource decisions quickly and confidently. Now, users can monitor their environment and change it when they see the results of the “What if” analysis. Longitude lets them do this easily and quickly with just a few mouse clicks,” explained *** Levin, Heroix VP of Development.

If a potential problem is flagged during monitoring, the user can quickly run a report showing current conditions, and then, just as fast, perform a “What if” scenario to see how service could be improved.

Color graphics in Longitude reports make it very easy to see individual VM resource use, and which individuals or groups have a need for the most resources. This allows faster decisions on actions that may be required to add new resources, change the combination of VMs using a single host, or moving certain VMs to a new host. These decisions, when made in a timely way, can reduce spikes in usage on a host that could affect performance.

Longitude makes “point in time” and historical information available to assess current conditions and issues that have arisen in the past. Longitude’s historical reports can help in situations where, for example, there might be a problem every night with resource saturation, but when a daily report is run, the resource appears normal. The historical report will show exactly when and where the problem occurred.

The new reporting format lets users see, in a single colorful graph or table, exactly how much resource is being used cumulatively by a resource pool, host, VM, or datastore. Software options from other vendors may show only individual resource use, require the user to view multiple screens or pages, and perform computations or make estimates to determine exactly how much of the total resource is in use. With the new Longitude, all relevant information is available instantly via a single dashboard.

The advanced reporting capability provides immediate visibility into the virtual environment, helping users monitor, detect, and resolve performance issues as well as capacity bottlenecks.

“We believe Longitude’s very graphical presentation is unique and helpful to people trying to assess a situation quickly and thoroughly. It is a very straightforward format that users can begin using almost instantly,” noted D. Levin, VP of Development, Heroix.

Longitude monitors VMware through a vCenter Server, collecting and monitoring CPU, memory, disk, network, hosts, VM’s, resource pools, and datastores. Reports can be analyzed using hourly averages, across multiple days, and for different VMs. Users can select the time and date ranges for regular analysis to determine usage trends, or to view special incidents or times.

Pricing and Availability

Longitude V7.2 for VMware is available now. Pricing starts at $199 for VMware monitoring.

Published Tuesday, June 05, 2012 6:04 PM by David Marshall
Comments
There are no comments for this post.
To post a comment, you must be a registered user. Registration is free and easy! Sign up now!
Calendar
<June 2012>
SuMoTuWeThFrSa
272829303112
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
1234567