Monitor VM apps

Application owners are going to press IT to allocate as many resources as possible for their apps in a virtual environment. That's natural. But Scott Herold, lead architect for Quest Software Inc. in Aliso Viejo, Calif., suggests you might want a tool "that can tell them when their [VM] environment is too good for them."

That's just one of the benefits he touts in the announcement this week of the company's Foglight 5.2 monitoring software, which now includes VMware software to its management portfolio. According to Herold, the latest version of Foglight alerts IT when a given application is not using the resources it's been assigned, helping to limit virtual machine sprawl. The tool also can predict when you're in danger of running out of resources such as mass storage, he says. Foglight 5.2 also prevents you from misallocating shared resources, so you can't, say, assign more memory than the physical server has installed.

Currently, Foglight 5.2 supports VMware, but later this year Quest will have a version for XenSource. Herold says the reason for the different releases is, in part, because of the various management interfaces XenSource has for the implementations from Citrix, Sun Microsystems and others. The company also intends to support Microsoft's HyperV virtualization product when it becomes available.

Foglight 5.2 is available now and is priced at $1,000 per CPU socket.