Tracking Storage Usage in Virtual Environments Still a Challenge

Virtualization has become a top monitoring challenge for IT professionals. The good news is that products have surfaced to help. The bad news? Not all of them deliver an even set of capabilities, particularly when it comes to tracking storage use by virtual hosts.

The sheer volume of products hitting the streets speaks to customers' eagerness for visibility and control of this growing technology. From Microsoft's Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (now in beta) to smaller product announcements from all kinds of startups, vendors are rushing to fill gaps in what the major virtualization suppliers (and their conmpetitors) are offering.

Products fall into various categories, starting with basic tools from the leading virtualizers: VMware offers its own VirtualCenter solution for managing virtual hosts; Microsoft has VMM, and Citrix has its own toolset. In addition, multiple suppliers replace, integrate with, or provide an augmented interface for virtualized environments, mostly VMware.

Among the VMware augmenters are eG Innovations, Veeam Software, and Vizioncore, to name just a few. These vendors focus on adding features like the ability to manage multiple instances of VirtualCenter for very large environments, something VMware has reportedly fallen down on. Others streamline reporting or add in reports not available in VirtualCenter.

Other suppliers, while integrating with VirtualCenter or ESX Server APIs, manage virtual environments as part of a broader management scheme that encompasses other data center elements. This is where Akorri, Onaro (now now part of NetApp), and Tek-Tools make the scene.There are also server management products, such as HP's Proliant Virtual Console, that manage virtual servers along with physical ones. HP currently supports only Citrix XenServer in its product, though.

While it's great to have lots of vendors on the job, it can be confusing to sift all the offerings in this space. Storage managers may have an easier time shortlisting, because many virtualization management wares, including those from Microsoft and VMware, do not provide a way to track the use of storage resources by virtual hosts.

Presently, just a handful of suppliers track the use of storage resources by virtual hosts, including Akorri, Onaro, Tek-Tools, and Uptime Software, to name a few. And most of these treat only VMware, not other virtual environments.

Given the uneven feature sets among virtualization management tools, as well as the newness of many products, at least one analyst suggests that would-be customers approach purchases systematically. "Make sure you know what your virtualization supplier has first, before buying any third-party products," says Mark Bowker of the Enterprise Strategy Group. What a virtualization supplier doesn't have may be on the roadmap.

Other considerations include whether a product supports heterogeneous virtualization environments, if that's an issue, or whether the product integrates with larger IT management schemes, such as those from BMC, CA, HP, or IBM.Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.