Virtualization technology is rapidly reshaping data centers across the globe. Server consolidation, resource conservation, disaster recovery and lower operating costs are a few of the benefits realized through today's virtualization technologies. Application virtualization technology is next on the horizon. Virtualization's benefits are particularly beneficial to providers offering Software-as-a-Service. In fact, the global technology trend tracker IDC projects that the virtualization market will double in size over the next five years.
While the beneifts are real, virtualization introduces new challenges to understanding its performance impacts on SaaS applications and their underlying infrastructure.
Meeting virtualization’s challenges
Absolute Performance's on demand software – System Shepherd® – is specifically designed to monitor, validate, diagnose and maintain end-to-end system performance in multi-tenant, virtualized SaaS environments.
System Shepherd® brings deep insight into virtualization and hypervisor software performance. System Shepherd® instruments the virtual instances and the hypervisor themselves, providing valuable information about application and system behavior across a range of operating conditions. System Shepherd® also correlates resource consumption of virtual instances operating on each virtual machine, aiding tuning and resource optimization.
WebWalk™, a component of System Shepherd®, creates synthetic transactions to simulate and validate real-world performance of any SaaS transaction. In addition, the newest member of the System Shepherd family – StressWalk™ – enables developers to simulate any number of concurrent transactions so that new applications can be thoroughly tested under stress before they are put into production. This transaction monitoring and load-testing can be fine-tuned for virtualized operating environments.
