As organizations move to virtualized production data centers shared by many departments, providing a painless method for monitoring capacity, resource usage and recovering cost is a pressing issue. After extensive beta testing with over 800 organizations worldwide, Release 1.0 of VKernel's Virtual Appliance for Chargeback and Capacity Reporting is now available for download from company's website.

    VMware identifies chargeback as one of the key impediments to growth of virtualization in the data center. Customers simply don't know how they will justify, pay for and recover the millions of dollars from business users needed to buy new hardware. VKernel tightly integrates with VMware's Virtual Center and automatically updates itself when changes are made to Folders, Resource Pools and Clusters. This integration frees Administrators from having to keep the appliance in synch with the virtual environment - a huge savings in time and an enablement for scalability.

    VKernel eliminates the pain from the chargeback process. Designed as a "plug and play" virtual appliance, the company's offering is the first virtual appliance certified by VMware to meter resource usage by departments and automatically generate chargeback and capacity reports. The VKernel virtual appliance requires no installation and becomes operational in minutes after downloading. This efficiency is not surprising, since the people behind VKernel are not only experts in virtualization technology, but are known for creating automated, efficient IT reporting in other technology domains.

    VKernel reports on all resources - CPU, Network, Memory and Storage. Additionally, customers can even add their own custom fields for chargeback. Costs such as license fees, cooling and electricity are just some examples of what a chargeback report might include. Companies of any size can use the VKernel appliance. It works equally well in a small environment with just a few ESX hosts and scales to companies with hundreds of hosts. Certified VMware Virtual Appliances go through comprehensive tests to ensure consistency, completeness and compatibility with the VMware Infrastructure. Feel confident knowing that VMware engineers have verified and certified the VKernel Chargeback and Capacity virtual appliance.

    "Given the underlying complexity of chargeback issues, it is remarkable that VKernel is so easy to use - just add business services and reports are generated automatically. It was so easy to use it I thought I was doing something wrong," said Craig Wedge from AMSA, one of the early beta users. "I could not believe that getting capacity reports like this was that easy."

    Andi Mann, Enterprise Management Associates commented: "Accurate chargeback is an important capability in any virtual environment, to allow IT to measure and recover its real costs from business owners. Even if IT is not actively recovering costs, it still needs these metrics for capacity planning, resource balancing, and maybe more importantly, to deal with the difficult politics of virtualization. Business owners need to know they are getting their "fair share of the pie," and solutions like VKernel let IT show business owners the value they are providing with virtualization."

    "The VKernel appliance functioned well in the appliance model right from downloading from vkernel.com. I was very satisfied with the ease of use and the visibility it provided to the virtual infrastructure." - Rick Vanover, CNET product reviewer.