VKernel offers several tools--which are downloaded and purchased individually--that provide specifically for the management of VMWare environments. Known collectively as the VKernel Virtual Appliance Suite, the individual components are, in fact, Virtual Appliances that can be run on VMware ESX Servers.

Common features across the product line include a common database (to avoid repeated discoveries), and automatic synchronization with VirtualCenter for the updating of information pertaining to host, cluster, and resource pool configurations.

Components currently offered in the product line include:

- The Capacity Analyzer is a capacity resource monitoring tool that provides a dashboard summary of current CPU, memory, and storage capacity utilization against VMware hosts, clusters, and resource pools. The vendor notes that the product is VMotion, DRS and HA aware.

The product's dashboard itself displays 5 main informational panels and is refreshed at 5 minute intervals. Alerting is also supported via SNMP or E-mail, with alert thresholds customizable.

Display panels include: Current capacity bottlenecks, which lists the top resources (pool, host, cluster), by the highest usage (in percentage) of storage, memory, or CPU; Future capacity bottlenecks, which analyzes usage and predicts potential resource problems in the future (the number of predicted days within which the listed identity will run out of the indicated resource); Capacity Availability Map, which lists the sources and notes both how many total VMs are supported by them, as well as how many VMs are actually being used; LUN Statistics, which display the available LUNs along with total and free capacity metrics; and Top Resource Consumers, which lists the top users in each of the three capacity categories with their actual composition and current usage (for example, total GB of storage or total MB of memory).

Capacity Analyzer is offered in Standard and Enterprise versions (the Enterprise version requires an Oracle or MS SQL DB and ships with an SDK), and a free trial version is also available. Pricing starts at $199/socket.

- The Chargeback Virtual Appliance provides a means of collecting and reporting usage metrics pertaining to resources utilized by each user. Resource consumption can be measured by applications, resource pools, and clusters; with the tool automatically E-mailing cost visibility and reports to end users. Such metrics as CPU, memory, storage, and network usage are enumerated; and support is also included for the definition of custom chargeback fields. Default chargeback rates and a calculator are also provided to assist the administrator with the definition of specific rates.

The Chargeback Virtual Appliance is also available in Standard and Enterprise versions, with differences and pricing similar to that of the Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer. The Enterprise version of the Chargeback Virtual Appliance is also available as a trial download.

- The newest of the VKernel appliances and currently available as a free Beta release, SearchMyVM provides a "Google-like" search facility for VMware environments. According to the vendor, the product can be used to locate VMs, hosts, clusters, storage, resource pools, files, snapshots, VMware tools, applications and configuration information; with better than 75 types of attributes indexed. SearchMyVM is a free download at the vendor's Web site.

Contact VKernel Corp for further information.