TFD10 Prep: VMTurbo

This is part of my series of posts for Tech Field Day 10.

VMTurbo make a piece of operations management software for helping to automatically manage resource allocation in your virtualized envionment. I’ve seen them present before, at Virtualization Field Day 4, and have used the software in my lab. Last time I was intrigued by the way they used a free-market analogy when talking about how the software works. It’s an imperfect analogy, but it works quite well in the way it models resource usage.

The interface is simple without being simplistic, and puts useful information right in front of you quickly. I haven’t looked at the latest version yet, but I believe it was moving to an HTML5 interface instead of Flash, which is good, because Flash is just an enormous security problem and I want as little of it as possible in my environment.

I also see that their latest marketing mentions VMTurbo is used alongside VMware’s vRealize Operations (VROps). I did a paid gig reviewing VROps a little while back, so this is interesting. VMTurbo say that VROps is good for monitoring against baseline, while VMTurbo is good for getting your environment into the right place and trying to keep it there.

This suggests that people use VROps for monitoring and alerting for troubleshooting problems, and VMTurbo to keep resources optimally allocated automatically.

Fair enough.

I can’t imagine it’d be that hard to use VMTurbo to highlight problems as well, though. Essentially, VMTurbo’s whole design ethos is to help you bring your system under statistical control by determining where the mean is for the control baseline, and how much variance is permissible before the system takes action to reallocate resources. That should mean you can put most of the system under automatic control and work around problems as they occur, provided there is a certain level of safety stock available.

VMTurbo represents an excellent trend in IT operations to start using techniques that revolutionised manufacturing in past decades. The industrialisation of IT is long overdue, in my opinion, and I’ve been banging on about all this stuff for well over a decade.

I look forward to heading about how VMTurbo have added to the already good baseline product, and where they’re taking things in the next couple of years.