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Virtualisation Field Day 4 is happening in Austin, Texas from 14th-16th January and I’m very lucky to be invited as a delegate.

I’ve been previewing the companies attending, have a look at my introductory post: Virtualisation Field Day 4 Preview.

VMTurbo presented at the last Virtualisation Field Day 3 with an update at the VMworld SFO compact edition so the Tech Field Day community know what they are about.

VMTurbo has an application called Operations Manager (bland name IMO). VM management is a very crowded market even harder to penetrate when vendors have their own offerings (VMware with vRealize Ops previously VCOPS and Microsoft with SCOM).

VMTurbo differentiates itself with an interesting take by modelling your data center as an economic market. VMs need resources and can be thought of as buyers of what they need be it CPU, RAM, IO, latency etc. Your infrastructure is the seller offering up goods to satisfy the sellers. This means everything can be associated with a price and can use the economic laws of supply and demand to set prices. As resources are more utilised and become scarce, their price goes up for the VMs so they should shop around for a better price where there is more supply capacity and therefore lower prices. This economic model allows VMTurbo to solve the problem of where to run VMs. This also translates directly into reporting on cost/benefits and an opportunity cost framework that seems very interesting.

Now economics are incredibly complex, just ask the financial wizards to despite thinking they knew everything let the market crash beneath them.

Markets and economics cannot be perfectly modelled but in a way that’s what makes them extensions of human nature. Fellow VFD4 delegate Justin Warren has a very interesting analysis of VMTurbo’s economic modelling which he published today so make sure you have a read. I’m not sure whether VMTurbo is taking the economic modelling too far or whether Justin is nit picking with economic detail but Justin is a super smart guy who I met at last in person at VMworld. He has an MBA, understands technology deeply and is a great writer to top it all off. He did some fascinating financial analysis on EMC and Sandisk for Storage Field Day 5 so I will be sure to listen to what he has to say about VMTurbo and whether their claims do stand up or whether we’re taking the economic modelling analogy too far and they do a good enough job of helping you manage your resources.

The problem with many other monitoring and management tools is they assume your VMs are all equal in terms of what their importance but this is obviously not the case. You have critical and non-critical VMs and you can’t tell the two apart based on size. Being able to to identify operational inefficiencies based on business needs rather than just technical resources is a great differentiator. VMTurbo can atomically correct these inefficiencies and you can create policies to ensure they are continually corrected. Policy is the foundation of the SDDC as I’ve written before so I like how they allow you to encode business rules in policy.

VMTurbo can interrogate vCenter, Hyper-V, XenServer or RHEV so has a very broad hypervisor support.

Control Modules then extent VMTurbo from the hypervisor into other parts of your datacenter from storage to VDI, network, containers, converged infrastructure as well as cloud and applications.

There is a free Virtual Health Monitor which you can download to do a whole bunch of monitoring of all the different environments VMTurbo supports and can give you its efficiency recommendations. It will whet your appetite to head for the full Operations Manager.

VMTurbo has an interesting take on VM operations using economics which it is using to stand out from the crowd.

Gestalt IT is paying for travel, accommodation and things to eat to attend Virtualisation Field Day but aren’t paying a penny for me to write anything good or bad about anyone.