Hyper9 Takes on Virtual Machine Sprawl

Hyper9 officials want to give businesses better insight into their virtual environments.

The company on 29 July rolled out the second generation of its flagship Virtualisation Optimisation Suite—for VOS—which is designed to help businesses create virtual environments that are suitable to their business needs, according to Bill Kennedy, executive vice president of research and development for Hyper9.

Enterprises over the past few years have embraced virtualisation with the hope of reducing hardware, space and power costs by moving workloads onto virtual machines, Kennedy said in an interview. However, those same businesses are now finding that costs generated by the “VM sprawl” are going up, causing what Kennedy calls “ROI erosion.”

“It’s become harder to manage [these virtual environments],” he said.

Hyper9’s VOS is designed to give businesses greater insight into those environments, enabling them to not only see what VMs are running what workloads, but also giving them the ability to more easily search, organise and analyse data from the virtual environments. That data is displayed through an intuitive user interface, Kennedy said.

A recent survey of customers by the vendor found that at least 20 percent of existing VMs are superfluous to a company’s operations, which is resulting in businesses spending more money than needed on their virtual environments. Through VOS, businesses can more easily find those underutilised or unneeded VMs.

Hyper9 earlier this year rolled out the first version of its VOS offering, which was primarily aimed at virtualisation administrators and offered some data collection capabilities, Kennedy said.

The latest version offers greater business insights and analytics, and is aimed at a wider array of people, including data centre administrators as well as virtualisation administrators.

A key new feature is Hyper9’s Workspaces, which lets users organize and share content, as well as gain better insight into the virtual machines and how they’re being used, Kennedy said.

Hyper9 also put in a feature called Active Links, which gives users one-click access to everything from data to reports to common tasks.

“You can find rogue VMs [that are not being used or are underutilised] though one click,” he said.

There also is automated monitoring and alerting, which gives users a heads up on such issues as change tracking, rogue VMs and VM sprawl.

Hyper9’s VDMA feature analyses historical performance and configuration data.