VKernel, a provider of enterprise-class performance and capacity management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, announced general availability of vScope Explorer, a free application specifically designed to visualize the performance and capacity health of a virtualized environment.

This new application from VKernel provides health visualization capabilities similar to those available within VMware’s vCenter Operations Management Suite but at no cost.

Virtualization introduces significant management complexity into a data center’s server and storage operations. Virtual machines utilize shared resources, have a high degree of mobility, and are subject to misallocation of CPU, memory, network and storage resources. Assessing the performance and capacity health of these VMs, hosts, and datastores involves collecting, analyzing, and then interpreting large quantities of instrumentation data in real time.

vScope Explorer automatically analyzes this instrumentation data with the same patent-pending Capacity Analytics Engine used in the award-winning VKernel vOperations Suite. Results are presented as a visual summary that can fit thousands of virtual machines onto a single screen. A simple mouse-over shows the cause for the health alert on the impacted object.

Specifically, vScope Explorer presents:

* Performance health for all VMs and physical hosts in an environment.

* Capacity health and impending performance issues for all physical hosts.

* Resource efficiency of CPU, memory and storage for all VMs and datastores.

This free tool promises broader infrastructure coverage, faster time to results and greater scalability than VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite as vScope Explorer provides:

* Multi-hypervisor support for Hyper-V VMs, hosts and datastores

* Health assessments of VM and datastore resource efficiency

* Visualization results in less than 24 hours after install