VMware Appspeed Session

Apart from a nice presentation about the changes to certification (which was labeled confidential, so I can’t publish about that now) there was a good session on VMware Appspeed this afternoon.

For those of you that may not remember: last year VMware bought a company called B-Hive and announced the Appspeed product at VMworld 2008. Appspeed is currently approaching its beta 2 phase and in the presentation was a lot of information about the way the product works within your virtual environment to monitor end-to-end application performance. For instance, it is possible to drill down to database level metrics about an application or get metrics over the entire application stack (front end webservers, application servers and back-end database servers) to pinpoint where problems exist.

Appspeed can also assist in measuring performance statistics of current physical workloads before they are virtualized to compare with performance metrics after virtualization as a means of assisting application owners with approving virtualization of their application.

Because the product is not final yet there can be changes in functionality but the functions that were shown looked pretty much done to me. You can get full graphical and tabular overviews of all the metrics that you want and there was talk of a separate front-end being introduced so the administrator can give the same insight into the application performance to the end-user or application manager.

There was no mention of a release data (other than 2009) and price point. The latter will be very interesting because there is a whole host of products that claim to do end-to-end monitoring or application performance monitoring but there are very few (maybe none) that are so tightly integrated into your virtual infrastructure as Appspeed can be.