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New Software Tackles VMware Monitoring

Got virtual machines in the data center? Do you know what they're up to? VM Monitor offers data center administrators visibility into virtual machines hosted on VMware ESX platforms. Developed by eG Innovations, a single agent per ESX server can drill down into multiple guest OSs to gather critical statistics, including VM host performance, and resource usage between the host and guest OSs. More importantly, the product provides holistic performance analysis across all guest VMs on the host. This information helps administrators ensure that sufficient memory and CPU resources have been provisioned, and helps spot anomalies in a guest OS that might affect the performance of the entire host server.

The company also offers software that can monitor performance metrics for over 80 business applications, including Oracle, SAP and Citrix. When used in tandem with the new VM Monitor, administrators can perform detailed root-cause analysis on problem applications and resolve faults more quickly. EG Innovations aims to provide a comprehensive toolset for system monitoring with application-specific targets across all the guests running on an ESX host.

EG Innovations also hopes to hit a run on pricing. A single monitoring license is required per physical host, regardless of the number of cores or the number of guest platforms, which should make the business case for large-scale deployments an easier sell at budget time.

At present, the product only targets VMware's ESX software. The company is investigating support for XenEnterprise from XenSource/Citrix. Pricing for the EG VM Monitor starts at $50,000 for 25 ESX servers.

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