Virtualization technology promises to deliver a painless route to the nirvana of Utility Computing. VMware ESX Server is the datacenter-class Virtualization platform used by 80% of Fortune 100 companies. Metron is a VMware Technology Alliance Partner and has integrated support for VMware in the Athene Performance Management and Capacity Planning product suite.

In the IT world the introduction of new technology to solve one set of problems usually introduces another set and virtualization is no exception.

Disparate and heterogeneous farms of applications servers can be consolidated to a single homogenous pile of blade servers but all the operating systems and applications that existed before the exercise still exist and require management. New dimensions are added to the performance manager’s task. Even in a VMware environment high utilization levels can only be sensibly and safely achieved with mixed workload types. Good Performance Management will be the basis of successful virtualization implementations.

VMware provides for flexible and dynamic physical resource management. Athene provides the information necessary to model and plan the distribution of guest VMs in the ESX Server Farms.