PlateSpin Recon

Manage Virtual Infrastructures

Consolidating physical servers onto VMware virtual hosts creates new challenges for those of you who must manage virtual infrastructure growth. It can become difficult to allocate IT costs to business units based on their usage of virtual resources. PlateSpin Recon Virtual Infrastructure Edition gives you the visibility you need to better manage and control your VMware environments on an ongoing basis. Its power features are geared to help you with virtual sprawl and automate IT chargeback reporting. PlateSpin Recon Virtual Infrastructure Edition lets you make the most of your VMware investments.

The Virtual Sprawl Problem

Since it is so easy to create a new virtual machine to address almost any requirement, you can quickly find that your resources are not being used well and your infrastructure has become unwieldy. In some cases, physical server sprawl is merely replaced with virtual machine sprawl. Virtual sprawl occurs when virtual machines are allowed to proliferate in an ad hoc fashion until eventually no one knows how many virtual machines there are across the enterprise, which hosts they reside on, who owns them or their intended purpose.

Solution

PlateSpin Recon Virtual Infrastructure Edition helps you better monitor and manage the proliferation of VMware virtual machines without having to implement restrictive IT policies or lengthy approval procedures. By providing greater visibility into how the dynamic virtual infrastructure is growing and changing, you can gain a deeper understanding of how many virtual machines are being used, who owns them and how they use available resources. With this increased visibility, you can continue to take advantage of the responsiveness and agility that comes from virtualization and still avoid the challenges of virtual sprawl.

The Chargeback Problem

With physical servers, if a business unit needs a new application, they are charged for the new server they need to run that application. In a virtualized IT environment, charging out shared resources is not so straightforward. Virtualization creates a pool of computing resources that can be shared across many different workloads, making it difficult to determine how resources are being used and how IT costs should be allocated.

Solution

PlateSpin Recon Virtual Infrastructure Edition offers complete chargeback reporting that makes messy spreadsheets, inconsistent data and the lack of shared costs in a virtual environment a thing of the past. With PlateSpin Recon, you can track, assign and report on costs and allocate IT charges to different business units based on their resource allocations or their actual usage of disk, CPU and network resources over time. PlateSpin Recon automatically converts IT resource allocation and usage data into billable values over monthly or quarterly time periods, so you can easily and accurately charge for shared virtual resources.

Key Features

• Calculate IT costs based on actual resource usage
• Effectively allocate virtual resources across various business units
• Automatically deliver chargeback reports to business units via email
• Run virtual machine growth reports to monitor the proliferation of virtual machines
• Easily obtain the latest inventory of virtual hosts with one-click inventory refresh
• Gain greater visibility into guest and host operating systems in the virtual infrastructure

Chargeback and VM Growth Reporting:

PlateSpin Recon automatically converts IT resource usage data into billable values over set time periods and delivers chargeback reports to business units. By using the virtual machine growth reports, you can control the expansion of virtual infrastructures and avoid virtual sprawl.