Vizioncore vOptimizer Pro - Comments on first look at demo

This morning I was able to see fist hand a demo of Vizioncore's new storage optimization tool, vOptimizer Pro. My first impressions on the ergonomics of it were that it was clean and simple and very "vReplicator" like. The workflow was easy to understand and could be configured in minutes. As for features, what the product tackles is the problem of vm space under-commit and over-commit. Based on rules the product will scale the virtual machine's storage up or down based on rules.

For example if you have a 5gig vmdk on ServerA with 4gig used and a 50gig vmdk with 5gig used on ServerB and applied a rule that said you should have 50% freespace available, it would resize ServerA to 8gig (enlarge vmdk) and would resize ServerB to 10gig (shrink vmdk).

The aforementioned scenario explains the meat of the product, but there is so much more. It also provides for optimization of Windows partitions based on the 64k block offset (Link to VMware doc on topic). And in the future will be able to optimize Windows VM's even more by removing unwanted services and other tweaks.

For those managers out there and people in charge of budgets, it is important to note that you can assign cost per Gigabyte to your datastores. This is used for reporting after an optimization pass to show cost savings from using the product overall or by pass (this type of thinking was a real plus in the old vCharter but now missing in vFoglight).

There were only a couple of negatives I saw. The first one is a current necessary evil; you have to shut down the running vm to optimize. This is due to application quiescence and system stability. I understand the need, however it does not take away from the fact that a maintenance window must be created and services will be offline. I have found that one of the major selling points and strategic directions of virtualization is "online all the time" (see also VMware Fault Tolerance). The only other minor negative is that it is only supported on a physical box. This is due to licensing issues, and I am sure that it would run fine virtually, however YMMV when getting support.

As for pricing, like all Vizioncore products, you get a lot for your money. The pricing is going to be $299 per ESX host socket (like all thier other products, even vReplicator now) list price. Obviously if you go through a reseller you will get a better price (please email me to get a quote from my company if you would like).

All in all this is a product that is well worth the money, will show an immediate ROI, and should be in every virtualized datacenter. As soon as I get my copy I will have some youtube demos up.