A key point: DRS and VMotion show where to balance workload, but they aren’t analytical and don’t see contention with other apps outside of VMware, King says. Since BalancePoint isn’t tied to the OS, it can see if VMware performance is impacted by other apps residing on the same SAN resources, he says. “DRS just sees what it sees for performance through the host (CPU, memory and storage), but it can’t see what the database server that’s on the same side as the SAN is doing,” says King.

The more VMs you move into production, the more critical predictability becomes, says Rick Knode, director of computing and communications infrastructure for San Diego Data Processing Corp. (SDDPC), a nonprofit provider of government IT solutions that serves customers like state agencies. Knode needed help managing resources in the company’s current environment (50 VMs on three servers) and in the future: Approximately 100 additional VMs will be added to production in the next fiscal year, Knode says. He looked to Vizioncore’s esxCharter tool to obtain performance information on SDDPC’s VMware ESX servers in real-time. This tool looks at performance levels and processes running inside the virtual machine. Being able to adjust the CPU power and memory allocated to VMs is critical when you need to make on-the-fly adjustments and terminate or move processes that are adversely affecting environments, Knode says. “It gives you more visibility into what’s going on.” For example, if a specific VM is eating away at one of his processors and affecting other VMs on that processor, he can use DRS and VMotion to move the VM onto another processor. But he says he wouldn’t know which VMs to move without Vizioncore.

At Wachovia, the fourth largest bank in the United States, Tony Bishop, chief architect, turned to Scalent for help balancing workloads for his 1,000 VMs running on a few hundred servers used in development, testing and back-office roles. Scalent, which may be used independently or in concert with VMware, helps Bishop repurpose servers quickly. “Some of the other [management] tools we looked at also have forms of provisioning, but they don’t have the ability to act in as near real-time as possible, like Scalent can,” says Bishop. Scalent’s software gives him management flexibility when apps are competing for resources, he says.