VMware Gets Performance Monitor

Monitoring virtual machines is a growing chore for system administrators, claimed Veeam Software as it announced Veeam Monitor, an equivalent of the Windows task manager for virtual machines running under EMC’s VMware.

“Veeam Monitor provides a bird’s-eye view on virtual infrastructure, as well as an easy way to drill down and view general resource usage per machine, all from a single console,” said Andrei Baronov, Veeam’s CTO.

The software provides administrators with CPU, memory, disk, pagefile and I/O performance data per virtual machine, Baronov said, adding that this should help users to redistribute physical resources among virtual machines to improve efficiency. It can also be used for planning and what-if analysis, Veeam claimed.

Veeam Monitor for servers costs US$200 per license, while a workstation version is $30. Evaluation copies and a personal edition are free. Baronov added that Veeam’s next product will be a program capable of scanning an enterprise network to discover and enumerate virtual machines.

Only Windows on VMware can be monitored for now, but Veeam CEO Ratmir Timashev said that other operating systems and VM software, such as Microsoft and Xen, will be added “in the near future.”

He continued, “We would like to become the leader in the VM enterprise infrastructure management, and will listen to customers’ requests and needs very carefully.”

The team behind Veeam is the same one that set up Aelita Software, which was subsequently acquired by Quest Software, and more recently founded utility software developer AMUST.

Veeam CEO Ratmir Timashev said that when he left Quest after the acquisition, he agreed not to compete with Quest on Windows systems management software.

“We believe VMware management does not fall into this definition,” he added. “We believe the market for VM systems management, like Windows NT was in 1995-96 when we started Aelita, is in its early stages—small but very fast growing.”

-Bryan Betts, Techworld.com (London)

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