Virtual Instruments brings automated VM right-sizing in v6.2

Storage performance monitoring specialist Virtual Instruments has announced Virtual Wisdom 6.2, which shifts the emphasis increasingly to analytics-driven proactive monitoring and alerting, with the ability to expedite changes in resources use depending on application workload changes.

Workload right sizer is the centrepiece of the release. This can increase or decrease resources allocated to virtual machines (VMs), including central processing unit (CPU), memory, disk space and network resources, across an entire cluster or application.

It works to user-set service levels and policies and gives priority to higher-tier applications. It can either effect changes itself via scripts generated to alter VM settings or make recommendations to administrators via its graphical user interface (GUI).

New enhancements to the predictive capacity management feature bring capacity reporting, plus capacity forecasting alarms for compute and network resources. These can provide charts with predictions about usage rates and when capacity will be likely reached.

Meanwhile, the workload drift analyser function monitors changes in application behaviour and helps determine whether changes in app attributes are at the root of issues.

Finally, Virtual Instruments has announced full visibility into Dell EMC Isilon scale-out NAS environments, where it can carry out storage capacity forecasting, map application dependencies and provide hundreds of metrics.

Virtual Instruments made a name for itself monitoring SAN infrastructures with physical taps into Fibre Channel infrastructure that tracked key storage metrics.

It added network-attached storage and object storage monitoring, as well as some ability to measure performance in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure clouds at the level of virtual machines but not underlying hardware.

That functionality still exists, but Virtual Instruments has transitioned from providing products that customers referred to when they had problems to solve, to one where monitoring is always on and advice and changes are proactive with alerts to inform customers of the need to make changes.

Now, with the workload right sizer function, for example, it can carry out those changes itself via scripts generated in Virtual Wisdom.

“Virtual Wisdom has always been always-on, but customer access was probably episodic,” said Virtual Instruments’ product vice-president, Tim van Ash. “They tended to look at it only when they had problems. Now we’ve gone from only looking at monitoring and problems to embedding analytics and a dashboard front end to bring automation and management.”

Recently, Virtual Wisdom acquired Metricly, with the aim of incorporating its capabilities into its portfolio to offer software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based infrastructure management across datacentre and cloud locations.