PERFMAN announced the availability of PERFMAN 7.2, the latest release of the company’s highly regarded cross-platform performance management and capacity planning software. New features in the latest release include Virtualization Planning Tool and VMware Sprawl Reporting, complementing the product’s existing abilities to monitor and manage VMware environments and providing PERFMAN customers with a comprehensive virtualization lifecycle management solution. The latest release also provides enhanced LPAR modeling for optimizing the use of logically partitioned CPUs. More information about PERFMAN is available at www.perfman.com.

“To realize the full benefit of virtualization technology, organizations must continually monitor and adjust their virtual environments for optimal performance. Virtualization is not a ‘set-and-forget’ technology,” said Lance Roncalli, chief executive officer, PERFMAN. “PERFMAN provides complete virtualization lifecycle management, beginning with discovery, selection, and modeling and continuing with capacity and performance monitoring and management.”

New Features in PERFMAN 7.2
The latest version of PERFMAN includes a Virtualization Planning Tool (VPT), which enables system administrators to determine which applications and physical servers are the best candidates for virtualization and to model the expected performance of virtual environment. VPT determines how many ESX Servers will be required, and PERFMAN continually manages ESX Servers and clusters to ensure that sufficient resources are available. In addition, VPT provides “what-if” modeling to predict system performance under new workloads and existing workload performance on new hardware.

“In our beta test, the PERFMAN Virtualization Planning Tool revealed that half of the SQL servers we monitored were utilized at less than 2% of their capacity, said Jerry Valentine, project manager, capacity planning and disaster recovery, Grange Insurance, a $1 billion insurance provider and long-time PERFMAN customer. “Information like this could easily save a company like Grange hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

The latest version of PERFMAN also includes VMware Sprawl Reporting, which reveals the proliferation of virtual machines across the enterprise. This feature displays virtual machine growth rates per ESX Server and reports on virtual machines that were previously provisioned but are currently inactive. PERFMAN 7.2 also features an improved LPAR model that fully supports specialty engines, including zAAP and zIIPs.

Virtualization Management
PERFMAN provides virtualization management features and functionality not available in any other product. First, PERFMAN is an available product that provides an aggregate view of multiple VMware Virtual Centers, delivering a “single pane of glass” view of an organization’s entire virtual infrastructure. Second, correlation of both ESX Server and Guest performance and capacity metrics with Guest OS metrics provides root cause analysis not offered by any other tool. In addition, PERFMAN collects years of data for trend analysis, enabling the identification of potential problems weeks before they impact users. Finally, as most organizations have both virtual and physical IT resources, PERFMAN provides highly scalable visibility across VMware, Windows, Linux, UNIX, and z/OS environments.

For more information on PERFMAN contact Christian Danella, christian@prequent.com at Prequent.