VMTN Blog

The topic today was VMware AppSpeed, which began life as B-hive Conductor. From the website: "The product "provides virtual infrastructure groups visibility into the multi-tier applications (performance, usage and dependencies) running across both virtual and physical infrastructure." I think it's another example of how you can do something better virtually by sitting outside the VM -- something that would be either impractical, much harder, or hopelessly tied to the OS if you were doing it with an agent inside a physical machine.

Asaf Wexler, former CTO of B-hive and now Sr Director of R&D here at VMware, joined us over an unfortunately poor telephone connection from Israel. Click on the big green play button or download the mp3. (51:00). Podcast info.

Links:

• http://www.bhive.net/ old B-hive site; still has product & technical info.
• AppSpeed at VMworld 2008 keynote (more notes on that keynote)
• AppSpeed video at VMworld 2008 keynote day 2
• More AppSpeed video at VMworld 2008 keynote day 1
• Commentary from Roger Howorth at ZDNet.co.uk
  

  As one attendee put it, this was really exciting because it would provide a quick way to find out where the problem was if users started complaining. Without this kind of technology, it could take hours to get enough insight into the application to enable further debugging. Also, the various departments responsible for the different elements in an application have a habit of denying responsibility and pointing the finger elsewhere.

  The kind of diagnostic information produced by AppSpeed makes this kind of behaviour easier to challenge, because administrators would have real data to back them up. For example, they could say, “Look, queries to your database are taking five seconds, while the rest of the transactions total 200 milliseconds.”

Next week, open topic roundtable with the panel. Drop by -- same bat time, same bat channel (noon Pacific time on Wednesday).