Measuring Up
So how much space will full monitoring of a single virtual machine consume? VKernel says to expect 341 kilobytes per VM per day. If you have 50 virtual servers, your database will eat up nearly 6 gigs of disk space yearly—and that's in addition to the default 1.1 GB appliance size. Clearly, you'll want to archive nonessential data to keep the appliance as lean as possible. While VKernel does provide shell scripts to help archive all that historical data, this is one feature that could use improvement. For example, we'd like to have archiving fully integrated into the appliance as part of the GUI.
VKernel says its virtual appliance won't degrade performance of your cluster. An early beta release did exhibit some degradation, but the company says this issue has been resolved.
VKernel 1.0 is available now as a 350 MB compressed downloadable file, an easy Internet grab. Pricing is $495 per CPU socket, per monitored host server, so if you have a three-server cluster, each with two sockets, you'll pay $2,970 in licensing. That includes the first year's support. Thereafter the standard 20% support fees apply, yielding a $594 operating cost in Year 2 and beyond.
Jonathan Berdyck is an NWC and InformationWeek contributor. He manages a team of IT analysts for a healthcare provider based in western Pennsylvania and holds a masters degree in Information Systems Management from Carnegie Mellon University. He can be reached at [email protected].
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