VMTurbo Removes Major App Virtualization Barrier

The new version of VMTurbo's workload management software, announced this week, is intended to make it easier to consider factors such as transaction time and performance characteristics for multi-tiered applications, and then perform corrective actions to maintain acceptable performance levels.

Targeted at cloud and virtualized environments, VMTurbo Operations Manager Version 3.1 extends the product's Economic Scheduling Engine to the application delivery controller (ADC) market by integrating with ADC products such as Citrix NetScaler, using business priorities to judge response time and add virtual machines as demand increases.

"There are two significant things here," says Bernd Harzog, analyst for virtualization performance and capacity management and IT-as-a-service at The Virtualization Practice. First, VMTurbo has opened up its product to be able to take response time and transaction throughput data from third-party application performance management solutions. This means users with an application running on a virtual infrastructure such as VMware or Hyper-V can have VMTurbo take response time and throughput data from tools that measure that, and ensure that other, less-important, applications do not consume resources that prevent the performance and throughput goals of the most important applications from being achieved, he says.

Second, VMTurbo is integrating with application delivery controllers and load balancers such as NetScaler to collect throughput data and be able to implement scaling based on load, Harzog says. For example if you have a load-balanced Web server farm, with each Web server running in a VMware VM, and the transaction load starts to exceed what the existing VMs can handle, VMTurbo can clone a VM and create a new Web server, he says.

"Taken together, these enhancements mean that VMTurbo--with an APM solution such as AppDynamics, New Relic, dynaTrace, BlueStripe, CorrelSense or ExtraHop--can address the concerns that owners of business-critical applications have about service-level quality when their applications get virtualized," he says. "This promises to remove one of the major barriers to virtualizing business-critical applications, and therefore promises to be the catalyst that will allow enterprises to accelerate their virtualization initiatives and address those business-critical and performance-critical applications."

The software, which was just updated to version 3.0 in February, competes with other virtualization management applications such as VKernel, vFoglight and SolarWinds. It automates corrective actions, as opposed to waiting for performance to reach a certain threshold, alerting the operator and then requiring the operator to figure out what to do, says the Burlington, Mass.-based company. The product is not fully competitive with VMware, but instead is complementary and helps users by making that software more manageable by providing an added layer of intelligence and automated control over the virtualized environment, says VMTurbo.

The new release is available now and comes in three versions:

• Free, which performs only monitoring, alerting and reporting;
• Enterprise, which costs $499 per socket; and
• Cloud-based, which costs $799 per socket.

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