A Partial Answer to Virtual Sprawl

Since we wrote a few weeks ago about virtual sprawl, dozens of vendors have contacted us to tell us about their solutions to the problem of out-of-control virtual machine deployments and the harmful effect this can have on applications. One notable startup, BlueStripe, I expect to make a mark in this area.

The young company, which was founded by people from Wily Technology (post its acquisition by CA) and IBM/Tivoli, is today introducing application service management for applications running on any server – virtual or physical. This FactFinder software assesses software programs to determine what parts of an application will or won’t virtualize well.

The software has three main components: first, it performs application discovery and mapping to find and understand existing applications. Second, it measures individual applications' health and performance. Third, it performs automatic triage analysis to determine which nodes may be causing an application trouble. “Virtualization is generally being adopted for simple servers that can run on one machine,” says Vic Nyman, COO. “The apps we’re helping with are multi-tiered applications, where you might have a web tier on the front end that users can click into, the middle tier might be an application server, the back end might be a mainframe transaction system. The challenge is these components sit on multiple servers and when there’s a performance problem, it’s hard to tell where amongst all these tiers a performance problem is occurring.”

So far, FactFinder is designed for the early adoption phase of virtualization, as application support teams start to move critical applications to virtual machines. Future versions of the product will monitor applications and help fix performance problems as they arise. The first release is for Windows and VMWare environments; later versions will encompass other operating systems and virtualization software.

VMWare already has virtualization management software, however, it doesn't provide insight into application performance. Existing business service management products (which are usually used to gauge application performance bottlenecks) can’t track applications once they’re running virtually, they tend to have a one-to-one mapping of application to server, according to Nyman. “What the whole industry has been seeking for quite a while is a way to see and manage an application wherever it goes, not limited to a silo or a particular server,” he says.

This technology and other products like it are important to Wall Street firms because they are getting more and more deeply invested in virtualization for all of its cost, deployment and management benefits, yet they’ve been fearful of running time-sensitive applications (e.g. order management, market data, risk analysis, derivatives pricing) on virtual machines because of the probable performance hits to which those applications would be subject. This software could be the missing link that makes virtualization feasible for high-performance applications. Pricing ranges from around $5,000 to $20,000.