Splunk Brings Order to VMware Virtualization Chaos

Technology Strategy No Longer Just an IT Responsibility

Figuring out which applications are tied to which specific systems resources has always been a significant challenge, and has only become more complex with the rise of virtualization. With so many virtual machines moving about the environment, keeping track of how system resources are actually being consumed has become a major IT issue.

To address that issue in VMware environments, Splunk this week released version 3.1 of Splunk App for VMware, which for the first time provides the ability to correlate, for example, what storage resources are being consumed by a particular set of virtual machines.

Leena Joshi, senior director of infrastructure operations marketing, says the latest version of Splunk App for VMware makes it easier to track changes to the overall environment in addition to identifying dormant virtual machines that are unnecessarily consuming system resources. In addition, Joshi says IT organizations can now take advantage of Splunk analytics to forecast future consumption of IT resources.

While there is no shortage of VMware management tools, Joshi says that one of the things that sets the Splunk approach apart is that Splunk creates an underlying common information model that provides IT with a single searchable repository. That means that beyond VMware, for example, IT organizations can correlate information about how applications such as Microsoft Exchange are consuming any number of types of heterogeneous virtual machine resources.

With the rise of Splunk indexing and search technology as an IT management tool, the ability to apply a common framework for discovering what and how IT systems are being used has gained a lot of traction in IT circles. After all, the first step toward being able to proactively manage something is knowing how it’s actually being used in the first place.