VMTurbo Faces Uphill Battle With VMware And Crowded Virtualization Management Market

VMTurbo, which makes management software for virtualized computing environments, has added support for Citrix XenServer, as well as new application performance measurement capabilities that discover and profile Windows applications so IT administrators can establish priorities for applications. Other enhancements to version 3.0 of its VMTurbo Operations Management include integration with VMware vCloud Director, the ability to manage multiple hypervisors with one virtual appliance, and improvements to its capacity planning capabilities. The software now supports Citrix XenServer, VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors, and is also expected to support the Kernel-based Virtual Machine hypervisor for the Linux kernel in the middle part of this year.

"We think their product is exceptional from a technology and functionality perspective," says Richard Ptak, analyst and managing partner for Ptak, Noel & Associates. "They offer a well-thought-out and well-structured solution to a significant problem. We believe they have the potential to be successful. Unfortunately, they are not the first in a crowded solution space. As latecomers to the market, even with a superior product, they are competing with and have to overcome the preconceptions set by competitors. Technical ingenuity and functional superiority is not enough at this stage of the market to guarantee success."

However, VMTurbo sees competition from vendors such as VMware--"the 800-pound gorilla"--as helping it by attracting more user interest to the problem of managing virtualization environments. In addition, the Waltham, Mass.-based company is seeing more of its customers want to take advantage of using multiple hypervisors, which VMTurbo can not only perform but can do through one interface, which its competition cannot do, it says. The added support for VMware vCloud Director means VMTurbo can manage multiple virtual data centers across VMware’s cloud deployment solution, which results in users getting a better management tool from VMTurbo than they are currently getting from VMware, the company says. Also, VMTurbo partners with VMware, even though the virtualization company has a management strategy and product that overlaps, it says.

According to Enterprise Management: Strengthening IT’s Core, only 15% of respondents to a 2011 survey of 313 business technology professionals said that they found their existing network management tools did an excellent job in providing performance monitoring and governance for the virtualization environment. Thirty-seven percent said their tools were satisfactory, 26% said their tools were somewhat satisfactory, 8% said their tools did a poor job, and 9% said they did not use tools to monitor their virtualization environments. "Traditional APM tools using SNMP polling or application agents are ill-equipped to manage virtual architectures," noted the report. Instead, the best options come from the virtualization vendors themselves, the report said.

VMTurbo Operations Manager 3.0 is available now. It is priced starting at $399 per physical socket for the Enterprise Edition. In contrast, competing software from VMware is priced per virtual machine, which typically results in a significantly higher price, says VMTurbo.

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