VMTurbo was kind enough to come to the GestaltIT Virtualization Field Day 3, and present to a group of technical bloggers about their product “Operations Manager”.  I was familiar (or thought that I was) with this product so I expected to see a presentation about some software that would give you alarms when virtual workloads started to misbehave.  I found out that my perception about this product was misguided so I wanted to clear it up for anyone else who was under the same impression as I was.

If you would like to check out the recordings for VMTurbo and others at VFD3 you can find them online.

All travel expenses and incidentals were paid for by Gestalt IT to attend Virtual Field Day 3. This was the only compensation given.

VMTurbo Goals

VMTurbo President Shmuel Kliger kicked off his presentation by explaining that VMTurbo’s Operations Manager’s main goal is to keep your virtual infrastructure environment in the “Goldielocks” zone by ensuring that you’ve provisioned enough resources to keep the applications working well, but no over provisioned because that would be wasting money.

Shmuel goes on to explain the law of diminishing returns when it comes to resources.  When a resource gets constrained, performance suffers,  A small amount of additional strain for resources makes the performance behave much worse.  So it’s not hard to explain to Systems Administrators not to get to the point where resources are on the verge of being constrained.  But at the same time, CFO’s don’t want over provisioned resources either.

VMTurbo Methodology

This was the super interesting thing that I didn’t understand fully.  VMTurbo Operations Manager looks at all of the resources in your clusters, including compute, storage, network, memory, etc and makes recommendations to you similar to how the stock market works.  Let me explain using an example.

Two virtual machines are both fighting for storage resources.  As Systems Administrators we know that resource contention is a problem.  VMTurbo looks at this not necessarily as a problem, but as a high price transaction.  Just like in a Market Economy, two people fighting over the same thing will drive up the price of the item.  VMTurbo Operations Manager would make a recommendation to move one of the workloads to a different datastore in order to lower the cost for both virtual machines.  Conversely, if a high priced resource like solid state disks aren’t being utilized, then this resource might be considered a bargain and Operations Manager would recommend moving a virtual machine to utilize the SSD in order to take advantage of the bargain.  Make sense?

Resources

If you’re interested in taking a peek at this for yourself, there is a 30 day eval version to download.  VMTurbo -Operations Manager

Eric Wright – Turbo Charging your IT Operations

Aaron Delp – Goldilocks & Supply Chains with VMTurbo