Version 4.3 expands hypervisor support and adds a VM Coordinator for workload management analytics and improved ability to classify workloads in a histogram.
John Gentry, Virtual Instruments’ VP of marketing and alliances
San Jose-based infrastructure performance management (IPM) platform provider Virtual Instruments is launching VirtualWisdom 4.3, an updated version of its IPM platform.
Virtual Instruments, whose CEO is former Symantec head John Thompson, is a late-stage startup which is still private and running off investments, but which is also posting 60-70 per cent year over year growth numbers. Their focus is on monitoring the health and utilization of end-to-end enterprise IT ecosystems for large customers, including 40 of the Fortune 100.
“We guarantee the performance and availability of mission-critical applications,” said John Gentry, Virtual Instruments’ VP of marketing and alliances. “We capture data from across the system with the most granularity possible, with a unique hardware-based probe which captures data playing a key role here. We then pull it into an advanced correlation engine, and an analytics engine on top provides insights in performance management, workload management, IT operations or process management, and capacity management.”
Version 4.3 expands several capabilities which were originally introduced in the version 4.0 release.
“In 4.0 we introduced use-case analytics,” Gentry said. “An exciting thing we are doing in 4.3 is introducing a new one for workload management. VM Coordinator looks at all VM/ESX resource utilization over time and determines optimal organization for peak performance – where to best place them in the environment, as well as the efficiencies you can expect.” Gentry said that while VMTurbo does this kind of historical analysis, it is limited to vCenter, whereas they pull data not just from vCenter but from fabrics, real time wire data, and more granular data.
“In 4.0 we introduced the ability to classify workloads in a histogram, where you could drill into them to see source and destination,” Gentry said. “We have now improved the ability to capture all that detail and draw insights from it, so that you can see the full characteristic of every single IO, because all IOs are not the same. This will let you, for example, tell if adding an all-flash array would give you a significant improvement in performance, or be a complete waste of money.”
Hypervisor support has also been expanded beyond VMware with this release to include Microsoft HyperV and IBM PowerVM.
“We are supporting incrementally more technologies across the datacentre stack to support the multiple hypervisor footprint of today’s customer data centre environment,” Gentry said. “We are headed in the direction of more hypervisor support, including KVM and OpenStack, going forward.”
Virtual Instruments has what Gentry called a “very channel oriented model,” in which sales volumes are 75-85 per cent delivered through the channel.
“We are still in the adoption cycle, that means in most cases we co-sell with partners,” he said. “We are also in the process of service enablement, which means we want to move the delivery of services from our own organization to partners. We see this as absolutely necessary if we are to scale. We now have our first couple of channel partners who are fully service enabled. The national partners were the starting point for that, but we also have local partners that are very service oriented. We want strong growth beyond simple fulfilment.”
They are developing strong partners in Canada as well.
“We have sales teams and a partner ecosystem in Canada, with OnX and Long View Systems at the top of that list,” Gentry said.
