VKernel announced that the company will add support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V with its complete lineup of Performance Lifecycle Management solutions. With delivery in Q1 2009, VKernel will offer heterogeneous management tools for modeling, monitoring, analyzing, validating, and chargeback to proactively assure performance of both Hyper-V and VMware ESX environments.

“With Microsoft entering the server virtualization market, it is inevitable that organizations will soon have a heterogeneous hypervisor environment,” said Alex Bakman, founder and CEO of VKernel. “A multi-hypervisor infrastructure will create even more complexity and management challenges for organizations that will need to be addressed with cross platform management solutions. We see this as an opportunity for VKernel to differentiate ourselves and enable our customers to best manage their environments and assure optimal performance regardless of whether they are using Microsoft or VMware.”

The VKernel Virtual Appliance Suite for Systems Management is a set of innovative, “plug-and-play” virtual appliances designed to quickly address real world systems management challenges with advanced analytics as organizations migrate to Microsoft Hyper-V and/or VMware ESX virtual data center environments. VKernel products enable IT groups to solve today’s critical pain points by providing visibility into the capacity and resource consumption of each virtual machine. The following VKernel Performance Lifecycle Management products will be supporting Hyper-V:

• Chargeback – provide cost visibility and implement chargeback processes
• Capacity Analyzer – proactively monitor shared capacity resources to prevent current and future problems
• Modeler – quickly test and validate additions and changes to see the impact on the environment before going live

“The Global 2000 server virtualization world of today appears to be primarily homogeneous with a single, proverbial gorilla-like incumbent,” said Cameron Haight, research vice president, Gartner, Inc. “With the recent shipping of alternative platforms from other vendors, however, we expect to see a more heterogeneous virtualization environment in the future which will dictate a need for management tools that can support multiple hypervisors.”

By joining the Microsoft Partner Program, VKernel will have access to Microsoft Hyper-V technical resources and specifications to more rapidly bring its solutions to market.

“Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V makes virtualization accessible to a broad set of customers through a familiar Windows experience, providing them with a lower cost solution for bringing new efficiencies to their IT infrastructure,” said Dai Vu, director of virtualization solutions at Microsoft. “We’re pleased that VKernel is delivering support for Hyper-V with its suite of management tools to help customers have a greater level of visibility and monitoring into their virtualized environments.”

For more information on VKernel contact Jill Searl, jsearl@beaupre.com at Beaupre & Co. Public Relations.