Virtual Instruments Corp. is further boosting its infrastructure performance management and application-tuning platform with the addition of support for Microsoft Hyper-V and IBM PowerVM virtual machines. Previously, the software had only supported VMware, Inc.’s vSphere. The firm also enhanced its analytics capabilities and said it will soon introduce a cloud option.  The company also said it soon plans to add wire-data performance probes for network-attached storage (NAS) and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) storage protocols.

The San Jose, CA-based company, whose CEO is former Symantec Corp. chief John W. Thompson, aims its VirtualWisdom platform at application developers and storage operations teams that need deep insight on issues that throttle performance. It specifically targets organizations using the DevOps approach to application development.

VirtualWisdom uses a combination of agentless hardware and software “probes” to collect data about what’s happening inside virtual machines, network switches, physical servers and storage systems, and to suggest actions that improve performance. System data is analyzed in real time to give users insight on host workload balance, anomalous behavior, root-cause diagnostics and optimization strategies. VirtualWisdom “doesn’t just tell you something is wrong, but instead tells you how to fix it,” said Simon Robinson, research vice president at 451 Research, LLC, in a quote from a Virtual Instruments press release.

Expansion of VM support is part of the company’s broader plan “to get to any VM and any interconnect,” said Barry Cooks, senior vice president of products, engineering and support. In contrast to traditional systems management platforms, which collect data and alerts to notify systems administrators of faults and outages, “We’re focused on improving application performance,” Cooks said.

He cited as one example a trend-matching analytic that can take snapshots of activity within VMs and present the source of likely performance problems stack-ranked by likelihood. “We’re able to make connections across the infrastructure that would take weeks to do by hand,” he said.

The new release includes a utility that aggregates and analyzes historical VM resource usage to eliminate over-provisioning and needless re-balancing. Other enhancements include histogram support, improved application profiling and visibility into VMware vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI) metrics.

Virtual Instruments also said it’s beta testing a cloud delivery option with a small footprint on customers’ virtual machines that can be more easily integrated with on-promise infrastructure.

Founded in 2008, the company has raised $76 million, according to Crunchbase. It claims that 40 of the Fortune 100 companies are customers.

Image courtesy of Virtual Instruments