10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch in 2009

The virtualization market took a sharp turn toward the nasty, practical and cheap during 2008. [Microsoft finally shipped a version of Windows Server with a native hypervisor, effectively giving away the ability to create multiple virtual servers from one machine. That’s the cheap. The nasty: Microsoft also pulled marketing stunts like sending guerilla marketers into VMware’s biggest U.S. tradeshow bearing casino chips with an anti- VMware message. Market-dominating VMware shrugged off Microsoft’s bravado and rolled out a host of higher-level management and data-assurance products and services, while it ramped up its marketing to emphasize its vision of an ambitious virtual data center operating system. (Catch up on what VMware CEO Paul Maritz had to say about all this at the VMworld show with this video.)

In the IT trenches, virtualization users, mostly unconcerned with the vendor spitefulness, will expand beyond the test, development and evaluation installations they ran in 2008, running more production applications in VMs during 2009, predicts Chris Wolf, senior analyst at The Burton Group. In addition to running virtual servers and server-consolidation projects, many IT shops are adding deeper layers of storage and network virtualization-making it even harder to see and manage the proliferation, performance and interaction of applications, networks and VMs that are part of a virtualized infrastructure of ever-increasing complexity, Wolf says.

In a mid-2008 survey Enterprise Strategy Group conducted among VMware users, only a quarter of respondents said the tools they had available to track and monitor their virtual infrastructures were sufficient to let IT maintain current or contractually required service levels, according to ESG analyst Mark Bowker. (That cautiousness and hunger for tools matches up with what we heard in CIO.com’s January 2008 survey of IT leaders on virtualization.)
While tools to manage that opacity are proliferating, most tools can see only the performance data visible to hypervisors-which are purposely blinded to the underlying storage and networking topologies on which they run. The really valuable tools will be those with a deep awareness of storage-area networks and network I/O connections, to match applications with both resources and elements that could affect their performance on the network and storage side, Wolf says.

Sure, VMware, Microsoft and Citrix all continue to make and push their own management tools. Industry stalwarts such as CA, Symantec, Cisco and Sun are in the virtualization game for real now too. But among the many other smaller, innovative vendors in the virtualization management arena, which ones deserve your attention? Here’s a look back at our list for 2008. And here is CIO.com’s look at ten makers of VM management, configuration and monitoring tools who are, unquestionably, worth watching in 2009.

1. Akorri
Akorri’s BalancePoint management applications are designed to measure the capacity of physical servers and their performance capacity in order to keep workloads from affecting application service levels. Its particular strength is the ability to find and gather performance data on software and systems beyond the virtual infrastructure, according to a lab review by the Enterprise Systems Group.

2. CiRBA
CiRBA remains one of the leaders in management of virtualized infrastructures. CiRBA tools are designed to help map out data center consolidations and virtual infrastructure development,combining capacity planning for both physical and virtual servers. CiRBA’s capacity planning takes into account factors such as application middleware, database query loads and required service levels. Pre-packaged analyses are designed to help determine optimum workloads for specific configurations of physical and virtual servers. They also allow customers to create their own criteria and evaluate either new designs or additions to existing configurations according to their idiosyncratic requirements.

3. Embotics
Embotics V-Commander is designed to take a lot of the stress off an IT staff by automating the control of VMs according to policies based on performance or business criteria. V-Commander, and the entry level V-Scout (available in a free version) are both designed to manage the lifecycle of individual VMs or the virtual infrastructure as a whole.
As we noted in earlier coverage of the product, Version 2.0 of V-Commander is able to ride herd on VMware, Microsoft and Citrix Xen VMs, as well as share data with VMware’s VirtualCenter management application.The tool also includes brokers that can exchange both data and commands with mainstream management applications. Ad hoc and canned reports are designed to help rein in rogue VMs and sprawl by enforcing limits on VM growth and the lifespan of those that are already running.

4. Marathon Technologies
Marathon continues to stay near the top of many virtualization users’ list of favorites by adding fault tolerance, high-availability and disaster-recovery capabilities to infrastructures that were supposed to eliminate many of those risks just by their very nature. The company’s everRun offers failover clustering, component-level fault tolerance that also protects storage and system components, and a system-level control that backs up memory being currently used by really critical applications; everRun keeps a real-time copy of data in memory for those applications so their workload can be shifted to another VM to ensure zero downtime with no loss of transactions or data.

5. Neterion
Neterion, a network-interface card manufacturer has been energetic in addressing a problem most virtualization and networking vendors have ignored: no matter how many VMs you can squeeze onto a single physical server, each VM still has the same need to get data into and back out of the physical server. Most physical servers do fine with a single 1Gbit/sec network interface card. Running many VMs on the same machine causes I/O bottlenecks that can gum up the works. Most VM users solve the problem by adding two, three or even four 1Gbit/sec NICs on the physical server.

6. Netuitive
Netuitive offers software that not only discovers, maps and monitors virtual machines and virtual infrastructures, but also tracks how applications and VMs run and responds when it spots trouble. That, according to Netuitive, is a far more accurate way to monitor the health of a virtual infrastructure than systems that require IT managers to plug in performance metrics and have a management system respond to thresholds that may or may not reflect the real-world experience of the applications.

7. Reflex Systems
Reflex Systems hits the three characteristics at the top of the 2008 virtualization ‘hot-button’ list: security, automated management and cross-platform support. Its Virtual Management Center includes modules for configuration management and provisioning, compliance monitoring and reporting, VM lifecycle management, security and performance management for both VMs and the applications that run on them. Security Appliance runs an agent on each physical host, adding deep packet inspection, reporting and application control to VMC’s list of capabilities.

8. Scalent Systems
Moving VMs from one physical server to another can be an effective way to match demand for power with supply, but not if the VMs forget where their data is stored and where to find a good network connection after they land on their new home. Scalent agents sit on each physical and virtual machine and are directed by a central controller IT managers can write scripts for using Java, Web services or third-party management software, using Scalent’s software development kit.

9. Third Brigade
Security specialist Third Brigade has expanded its host-based virtual-server security model to include not only non-virtualized systems, but also cloud-based applications that live in shared infrastructures such as Amazon’s EC2. The company’s Deep Security offers firewall, intrusion protection, integrity monitoring and compliance validation and higher-level certification such as compliance with the Payment Card Industry’s Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) that secure remote debit-card and other electronic fund transfers.

10. VKernel
VKernel tools address a major blind spot in virtual infrastructures: not just the difficulty in knowing what VMs are running at any given time, but what CPU, storage, network and other data-center resources they’re using individually or as a group. The software suns on a SuSE Linux kernel as a VM within VMware’s ESX to measure the resources the VMware setup is using, and generates chargebacks to make accounting and usage-reporting on virtual machines simpler.•