Now that I am six months removed from VMware, I will admit that we executed poorly in the space of performance management. I know that there is intense work going on right now in acquisitions, unification of performance management tools, and vCenter improvement through folding in vscsiStats and esxtop data. But in the area of performance reporting and visualization, VMware’s success has been minimal. VMware hopes its acquisition of AliveVM will plug part of this gap but today it is safe to say the field is wide open for VMware’s partners.
This morning one such partner, VMTurbo, gave me a demonstration of their offering in this field. Their product provides an obvious improvement on vSphere’s performance visualization capabilities. But given the state of VMware’s visualization capabilities virtually any graphical front-end provides an improvement. But what really set off my imagination were two features I had not seen before:
- A third-party alternative to DRS.
- Cross-cluster resource optimization.
But in an effort to further obviate my own job, I will try and generalize the troubleshooting flow to add more clarity to the process.