You've likely heard all about the resource consolidation, machine isolation and increased security benefits of virtualization. But less publicized is the fact that virtualization may also improve your ability to view capacity and consumption stats, especially handy for IT shops that want to assign dollar values to resources used by business units, and charge accordingly.
The VKernel virtual appliance is a VMware-based virtual machine running on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server, with MySQL, Apache Tomcat and an Ajax app server bundled. It works only in a VMware environment, and it monitors only virtual machines on ESX host servers. VKernel founder and CEO Alex Bakman says he won't expand to other virtualization platforms until those platforms gain more market share.
VKernel's functionality is based primarily on a concept called the "business service." Business services are containers for capturing aggregate values among groups of virtual machines that either provide a single service, such as e-mail, or that differ in functionality but comprise a particular distributed application or business process, like CRM. The "customer" concept is used to generate chargeback reports, and each customer can have multiple associated business services. Business services can also be made up of ESX folders, clusters and resource pools, so when you deploy additional machines, the appropriate business services are automatically updated. You define the unit cost for CPU, memory, storage and network in predefined or custom increments.
VKernel constructs chargebacks for each resource type or business service by taking a daily average of resources consumed, then averaging those values over the chargeback period, say, a week or month. Version 1.0 is limited to computing averages, but VKernel says future iterations will allow more precise consumption measurements. That's important for computing chargebacks where you need to know totals, not averages, as with power or administrative costs.
VKernel provides default resource pricing as well as a simple mechanism for IT to tally its own expenditures, so you can get started quickly—and get back to focusing on the business rather than arm-wrestling unit costs and complicated server groupings.
The reporting capability is fairly robust. You can generate reports on-the-fly or automatically at specified intervals. VKernel's Web site has examples available for viewing and download.
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