Hyper9 will be in full force for VMworld 2010.  We invite you to drop by our booth (booth #336) to see what's new in Hyper9's Virtual Environment Optimization platform as we continue to build on our legacy of virtualization management thought leadership.  

Our theme this year is the Right Data for the Right Audience at the Right Time.  Managers, application owners, lines of business, and storage admins all have different needs and require different insights from the virtualization administrator.  Come see how Hyper9 can help you satisfy your various audiences as you plan your move toward virtualizing mission-critical applications, increasing consolidation and service levels, and optimizing and planning your capacity.  

Discover how Hyper9 is breaking down the barriers to virtualization:

• Role based, customizable dashboards – provide integrated alerting, trending, capacity planning; offer drag and drop customization such as by management discipline and role.
• Application-aware capacity/performance visualization – projects when resources will run out (CPU, memory, shared storage), how many more workloads can be added, shortage forecasts and performance hot spots.
• Storage I/O analysis – gives visibility into storage bottlenecks; provides detailed storage metrics such as latency, throughput, IOPS (input/output operations per second) across all storage types including FC, iSCSI and NFS.
• Application service support – provides application tagging and dependency mapping to the virtual infrastructure, impact analysis and service modeling.
  

Here's how you can find us at the show:

• DEMOS - Booth #336: See Hyper9's latest product release in action, featuring the Cloud Cost Estimator for Amazon EC2, integration with third-party portals including MS SharePoint and Wikis, and added support for VMware vSphere 4.1.   
• EXEC 1:1s : Meet members of Hyper9's executive team, including CEO Bill Kennedy, VP of Product Strategy Jonathan Reeve, VP of R&D Michael Nels, and VP of Sales Greg Barone.
  

VMworld 2010 Show Floor Availability:

• Monday, August 30, 4:00pm -- 7:00pm, Tuesday, August 31, 11:00am -- 6:00pm, Wednesday, September 1, 10:00am -- 6:00pm and Thursday, September 2, 10:00am -- 2:00pm

Not going to VMworld?  No problem.  Please join one of our upcoming online Webinars to learn how you can provide the Right Data for the Right Audience at the Right Time.

Wed, Sep 8, 2010 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM CDT  

Wed, Sep 15, 2010 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM CDT 

Wed, Sep 22, 2010 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM CDT 

Wed, Sep 29, 2010 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM CDT

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Hyper9 Community: http://community.hyper9.com

This dashboard quickly identifies VM sprawl in your environment.  It includes key focus areas such as zombie VMs (off and not used in 30 days) and idle VMs (very low activity), large and old snapshots, rightsizing opportunities for over provisioned VMs, etc.  Please give it a day or so to render the data, since some of this content will be new trends to the system.  Trends are stored values from calculations and we store from the time the trend is created.

Download the file here:  http://download.hyper9.com/support/VMsprawl_db.zip

To import xml content, Go to the Content section (Upper Yellow Menu Line) click on the Import Content button in the lower right corner of the Content viewer. Next, select the privileges (visibility) that you wish to assign the new content. After selecting privileges, a dialog will open asking you to select the file to import. Hyper9 content is XML and you may browse to open any XML file that Hyper9 delivered to you to import it into the system. After import, the new content is available in the content browser and may be edited, executed, deleted, or tagged.  Go to “Home”, then select this dashboard by clicking “more” at the bottom right of any dashboard.

http://firstcontact.hyper9.com/index.php?title=VOS:Content

Hyper9 now has a dashboard that estimates the cost to run your environment in the Amazon On Demand EC2 environment.  It is an interesting dashboard for companies or divisions trying to compare between an internal and external cloud model.  The assumptions and the included widgets are listed below.  Note:  you must be running a recent version of the Hyper9 VEO platform.  For more information on how to get started with VEO, visit www.hyper9.com. 

To load this dashboard into your environment, follow these steps:

1.       Download the file here:

  http://download.hyper9.com/support/cloud_cost.zip

2.       Copy the XML file to the Hyper9 server

3.       Click on the green “Content” link at the top of the page

4.       Click on the Import Content button near the bottom right of the page

5.       Click World Writeable

6.       Select file “cloud_cost.xml”

Assumptions

Hyper9, Inc., the enterprise-class virtualization management company, today announced its latest product release focused on bringing greater transparency to the "black box" of virtualization initiatives. The solution features a Cloud Cost Estimator Lens, a customizable dashboard that uses data and analytics to estimate how much it would cost to run a company's virtual machines on Amazon EC2. Additional features include integration with common collaboration tools such as Microsoft SharePoint, wikis and other external web portals, and support for VMware vSphere 4.1.

While the operational benefits of virtualization have been well-established, it's often difficult for application teams and business stakeholders to understand how virtualization ties back to tier-1 business processes – and to collaborate and share these insights back and forth.

Hyper9's latest release helps organizations pinpoint how much memory and CPU capacity VMs have been allocated, and how much network bandwidth and storage throughput they are consuming, and then translates those costs into what they would pay to run a mirror environment in Amazon's EC2. This helps IT set and compare baselines between internal and external cloud deployments, and recommend the best investment decisions for the business.

Integration with third-party collaboration portals such as SharePoint provides another level of critical transparency. Using Hyper9, business owners for a key service or application can now access real-time reports showing the uptime of critical VMs, the amount of resources they are consuming, and the potential "chargeback" cost to the business – without ever leaving their SharePoint application. This information can then be shared cross-organizationally to prioritize virtualization initiatives and focus investments on the areas of greatest benefit to the business.

"One of the key barriers to virtualization success is the lack of transparency into how critical elements are performing, what they cost, and how those costs tie back to the business," said Bill Kennedy, CEO of Hyper9. "With our new Cloud Cost Estimator and third-party portal integration, we can help enterprises analyze that data in the context of their own internal operations, project those costs to other external environments, and even share that information cross-organizationally for more strategic decision-making."

For more info, visit: http://www.hyper9.com/product_lenses.aspx.  To request a demo, go to: http://downloads.hyper9.com/h9ds/scheduledemo.jsf.

Supporting Resources

Hyper9 Community: http://community.hyper9.com

Hyper9 Blog: http://community.hyper9.com/blogs/

Hyper9 Twitter: http://twitter.com/hyper9 

Hyper9 Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Hyper9/66220864458

This is an example of a departmental dashboard, useful for showing the type of information that you can provide to your internal customers.  It includes key performance metrics such as CPU and memory utilization, allocation, consumption, storage depletion estimates, VM configuration details, and resource costs.

This dashboard example is based on a Department label titled Finance.  It can easily be reconfigured to align with other particular interest areas (departments, customers, projects, geographies, tiers, etc).  So, for it to work in your environment, you will need to label a subset of VMs with the title “Finance”.  This is done from the search page by selecting the VMs of interest then hitting the button called “Labels” and following the label process.  More information is available here:  http://firstcontact.hyper9.com/index.php?title=VOS:Labels

To load this dashboard into your environment, follow these steps:

1.       Download the dashboard here: http://download.hyper9.com/support/finance.zip

2.       Copy the XML file to the server

3.       Click on the green “Content” link at the top of the page

4.       Click on the Import Content button near the bottom right of the page

5.       Click World Writeable

6.       Select file “finance.xml”

Capacity planning has become a critical component of virtual deployments where the sharing of underlying hardware resources (and the contention that inevitably arises between them) is built in by design.  It requires consolidated views across the myriad IT silos of the virtual infrastructure, where consumption and waste can be understood in the context of the real-world business processes and applications.

When: Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Time: 12:00PM Noon CDT

Webinar: 6 Elements for Effective Capacity Planning in a Virtual Environment

Register Now

Please join Hyper9 for a 30 minute Show-n-Tell webinar where we'll cover the six critical elements to consider for effective capacity planning in a virtual environment:

• Identify performance issues
• Project when resources will run out based on historical trending
• Estimate how many more VMs can be added to the virtual infrastructure
• Understand capacity usage from both an application and workload perspective
• Tie it back to the business
• Generate management reports that are actually useful

Click to Register for this free Webinar.

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This is one version of our chargeback report.  This report is based on consumed resources in the virtual environment, rather than allocated resources or a tiered based approach.  Those versions of the chargeback report should be available shortly.

You should be able to import this XML file and generate a chargeback report for your environment in less than an hour (probably about 10-15 minutes if the VMs are already labeled by department).

To start the process, download the .py file here:  http://download.hyper9.com/support/ChargebackByLabel.zip

This report requires that you have labeled the VMs in your environment.  The typical Label name is called “Department” but you might label you environment by project, geography, internal or external customer, etc.  For this to work in your environment, you will need to label the VMs in your environment.  You can see a summary of your labels by going to Configure > advanced > labels. 

Adding a label is done from the search page by selecting the VMs of interest then hitting the button called “Labels” and following the label process.  We can also import labels from external sources such as a spreadsheet or custom field in Virtual Center.  More information on Labels is available here:  http://firstcontact.hyper9.com/index.php?title=VOS:Labels

Please copy the .py report file into the hyper9 reports folder on the VM  … \Hyper9\Server\data\content\reports\

Once copied there, it will show up under “Reporting” in the Hyper9 Interface.

To run the report, follow these steps:

1.       Click on the green “Reporting” link at the top of the page

2.       Click on the report “Chargeback by Label”

3.       Enter in your estimated costs for CPU, memory, storage, label name, etc, then run the report (see attached screenshot for input details).  There are defaults you can use that will automatically be used if the value is blank.

4.       The report can be downloaded from the “My Content” section of the Administrator dashboard.

5.       The format is Excel.

Let us know if you have any questions.

VM Sprawl is an often used term in virtualization that is generally used to describe the wasted resources that can occur when virtual machines proliferate.

Hyper9 VEO can detect and prevent VM Sprawl from happening in your VMware environment.  With it, you can find, report and alert on:

• VMs that have not been logged into for any extended period of time
• "Stale" VMs with inactive disk files
• Overallocated VMs wasting valuable resouces such as CPU, Memory and Storage
• "Orphaned" VMDK files that are not completely removed from inventory and wasting storage
• Snapshots that are out of control and taking up valuable storage
• and More...

Check out this quick video clip to see how in action. 

Hyper9 Virtualization Environment Optimization (VEO) helps you understand the health of your VMware environment.  Our discovery-enabled approach detects virtual elements and their relationships and translates increasing volumes of data into actionable business insights.

If you are a VMware administrator and want to see Hyper9's solution in action without having to install it in your own environment, this is the video for you.  This 45 minute presentation covers best practices and demonstrates how Hyper9 VEO can help you:

• Regain Control of Your Virtual Environment: Configuration Management, Troubleshooting & Instant Sprawl Identification
• Optimize Virtual Resource Performance & Capacity Planning: Capacity Planning, Storage and Performance Management
• Understand Virtualization's Impact on Applications: Business Blueprinting and Chargeback/Showback and Application Support

This video is now available on-demand so that you can watch it at your leisure.

Click now to watch the Hyper9 VEO Product Overview for VMware Administrators video to see how you can start getting a better handle on your VMware environment.

Hyper9 provides users with an extremely powerful monitoring and alerting platform.  It ships with nearly 40 different useful alerts, canned, out of the box.

The monitoring and alerting widget on the administrator dashboard offers a number of active alerts that monitor the VMware environment.

It spans a wealth of conditions such as performance, understanding CPU and memory contention, storage contention, capacity-based alerts that notify you when you are going to run out of resources, as well as configuration best practices so that you can stay on top of things such as VM Sprawl.

If you click on an alert within the widget, Hyper9 opens an alert detail view - a powerful view that shows you which objects are affected by this alert.  It can also navigate back in time to see when the alert fired in the past and shows you what was affected.  These objects can also be added to a list so that you can perform other actions on these objects elsewhere within the Hyper9 product.

Alerts are driven off of the powerful search-based Hyper9 platform.  Because of that, you can easily customize, configure or create alerts to operate the way you want them and need them to work within your own environment.

You can also change the severity of the alert, the item it effects, modify alert suppression, change trigger alerts based on various attributes, leverage multiple notification methods, or fire off an external action based on an alert.

The key takeaway again is that the Hyper9 Alerting and Monitoring functionality is as flexible as the rest of the VEO product because of its underlying search-based platform.

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In a previous post, we explored the virtualization management journey, the steps through which organizations tackle different aspects of management as they adopt virtualization in the enterprise.  Chargeback is one of those interesting aspects of management, as most companies approach chargeback itself as a journey - hence a journey within a journey!

Some believe true chargeback to be a necessary supporting element of private clouds, where the business pays for the IT services it consumes.  Virtualization chargeback has long been considered a necessary precursor to true service management - which raises another important point - the business is interested in the services it consumes in support of desired business outcomes, not individual component utilizations such as host CPU, memory and so on.

The majority of folks that Hyper9 speaks to would like to achieve the lofty chargeback goal but want to start out with "showback" (sometimes also called "shameback"!) - achieving transparency with the business by showing which departments (or other business entities) are utilizing resources in the virtual environment.

Showback and Chargeback also come in multiple forms, such as charging (or showing) based on fixed (# of VMs), allocated (how big are the VMs?) and usage (how much are VMs using?) based scenarios.  In many cases, organizations will want to use one or more of these mechanisms, often in combination.  The point here is business policies and how they want to pay for IT services are varied - the management solution needs to be flexible enough to support the desired business policies - not the other way around.



Hyper9's search based platform allows for incredibly flexible modeling of business hierarchies, policies and delivered IT (application) services, allowing organizations to leverage any desired combination of fixed, allocated and usage based scenarios.  Furthermore, rich and open APIs enable transparency with the business, for example by embedding reports and showback/chargeback trends into existing portals such as Sharepoint portals and wikis.  After all, the business wants to consume information in a way that they are already accustomed, potentially overlaying this with other existing insights.

Take away - ensure your chargeback/showback solution is flexible enough to support the modeling of your specific business polices and IT services, and can integrate seamlessly into your existing management ecosystem.

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Depending on where you are in your virtualization maturity tells you how and when you should implement a chargeback solution. 

The first step is providing cost transparency or "showback" so users understand usage and service costs. 

Next is understanding where consumption drives higher or lower variable costs. 

And finally, supporting the multiple chargeback models that business units will demand - especially with shared service delivery models.

Please join Hyper9 for a 40 minute Show-n-Tell webinar where we'll cover how to reduce overall IT spend on the virtual infrastructure by successfully implementing a showback/chargeback solution in your organization.

In this Webinar, we will cover:

• How to create cost transparency and accountability so business units understand what's driving their IT costs
• How to accurately measure costs, conduct analysis and report on the resource usage and allocation of virtual machines (CPU, memory and storage)
• How to enable a better understanding of how much resources cost and what can be done to optimize resource utilization
• The Virtualization difference between physical assets vs. shared infrastructure, Ease of deployment and changes, and Chargeback as a natural way to control Sprawl
• Mapping the Virtual Infrastructure to the Business by leveraging vCenter and other sources.

See Hyper9 VEO in action to see how you can provide Chargeback or Showback within your VMware environment with the help of Reports, Trends, and Dashboards and then how to share that information out to external sources.

Date: Thursday, July 22, 2010

Time: 12:00 PM CT, Noon

Learn: Best Practices for Leveraging Chargeback for Increased Cost Optimization and Allocation of Resources

Register for this free Hyper9 Chargeback Webinar now.

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