Vizioncore announced availability today of vCharter Pro as an enterprise-class performance monitoring and management solution for ESX shops.

VMware management got you down? Management issues with any complex virtualized environment can tax local resources and vendor-supplied tools. Tools like VMware's own Lifecycle Manager are welcome additions to Virtual Center, offering automated provisioning, management, and forced retirement for Infrastructure 3 shops. As mentioned a bit ago, VMware expects to sell LCM into shops with more than a few dozen VMs.

Vizioncore hopes that larger shops (with hundreds or thousands of VMs) will look beyond stock tools to its vCharter Pro offering for planning and provisioning complex Vmware infrastructures. Embotics, CiRBA, eG Innovations and other companies are all hoping ESX customers will look for additonal automated guidance and management tools. Per the PR copy, vCharter Pro provides layered views encompassing VirtualCenter, data center, clusters, resource pools, ESX Server, VM, and datastore levels ... rather than simply reporting statistics, vCharter Pro understands each object's role in the virtual environment and constantly analyzes performance data according to advanced rules and logic specific to that role.

Wondering if a new VM will play well on a specific host? vCharter Pro also will model pinpoint resource contention issues among CPU, memory, disk, and NIC IO, so you can flesh out fairly complex what-ifs for correct placement of VMs or when designing VMotion rules.

Vizioncore produces a number of other virt-specific products, including vRanger for backups; vOptimizer, which crunches windows guest images down for smaller VM guests on Vmware Workstation and Server and pre-Hyper-V Microsoft virt platforms; and the pretty nifty vConverter, a 'Swiss Army knife' P2V tool that should really be classified as an any-to-damn-near-any (A2DNA) tool. Target images can be built for VMware, Microsoft, XenServer, or Virtual Iron. Sources for those images can be an existing physical machine or a VM from ... VMware, Microsoft, XenServer, or Virtual Iron.

I'll keep my fingers crossed that the heterogeneous support shown in other Vizioncore products works its way into the vCharter Pro line to allow a single management interface for multivendor virt shops. I've got a nice little test lab running four platforms at last count, in case anyone at Vizioncore is reading. While I can't imagine a good reason to bring that much complexity into a production environment, I know a number of shops that would like to have a reasonably priced, robust cross-platform performance analysis and management bundle for, say ESX and Hyper-V. Or Citrix Xen and Hyper-V. Or VMware and Novell SUSE+Xen. Or Virtual Iron and OpenVZ, for that matter ...