Dan's Take

A 'Market Model' of Configuration Monitoring and Management

VMTurbo takes a different approach to resource utilization.

• By Dan Kusnetzky
• 02/16/2016

I recently had a discussion with VMTurbo executives about the differences between VMTurbo's Operations Manager and other configuration monitoring and management products. What soon emerged is that VMTurbo believes that complex virtual environments have too many moving parts that are changing too rapidly for a static configuration optimization scheme to be effective.

The Market Model
Operations Manager is based on a different vision than many other configuration optimization and management products. The company uses what could be described as a "market model" to examine what systems and their components are doing and what workloads require; Operations Manager then automatically adjusts parameters to make an environment operate "in the green." The market model looks as each individual component as either a "customer" or a "manufacturing plant," and Operations Manager attempts to match the production of resources with consumption.

In the company's words:

"VMTurbo abstracts workload (applications, VMs, Containers), compute, storage, fabric, etc. into a common data model. Those entities then price their resources based on efficient supply and demand. As utilization of a resource increases so does the price.

The market-based algorithms allow data center entities to figure out placement, sizing, and start/stop actions for themselves — effectively assuring application performance, while maximizing infrastructure utilization. Solving the challenge of intelligent workload management in software allows IT teams and their virtual and cloud environments to scale smarter."

Operations Manager continuously monitors resource availability and consumption by workloads and their components. It then uses sophisticated machine intelligence to dynamically compute the best configuration of VM placement, VM memory capacity, and storage and network usage. System, network, VM, container and other component configurations are dynamically adjusted to place the systems in use to the proper, "healthy" configuration.

The company claims that its product starts to deliver results in under an hour and organizations get a positive return on investment in less than three months.

Dan's Take: A Different Viewpoint Can Make All the Difference
After seeing a demonstration of Operations Manager and reading through customer success stories on the company's "Greencircle" customer forum, I came away impressed with several things. First, they show an amazing level of improvement in performance, reliability and resource utilization. Second, the product is very easy to install and use. Third, Operations Manager is able to quickly understand and improve operations of systems, VMs, containers, networks and storage under its control.

If your organization has deployed a complex, highly virtual computing environment, it's worth knowing about Operations Manager.