Virtualisation Field Day 6 – Quick Preview Cirba

I have been invited to a number of Virtualisation Field Day (sorry have to spell it the correct way) by Stephen Foskett, but for one reason or another things didn’t work out at my end.  The stars have aligned and I’m pleased to say I will be attending VFD 6.

All of the companies that are presenting are new to me, which makes things a lot more interesting, as a tech we like shiny new things!  The second one is Cirba.

What Do They Do?

According to the strap line on the website it’s ‘Infrastructure Control for the Software-Defined Era’.

At first glance Cirba seems an hypervisor agnostic answer to vRealize Operations Manager, with capacity planning and resource efficiency analysis.  Where it comes into it’s own is the control of virtual machines based around software licenses to ensure compliance and drive down cost by ensuring VM density and isolating licensed VM’s.   I for one would be interested to see how the meta data is weighted e.g.

‘What is the weighting on license compliance cost savings versus vCPU to pCPU ratios, fault domains, complexity of maintenance using DRS rules’

Cirba also provides intelligent placement for new workloads, this is rather interesting, most application architects don’t really know what their application is gong to consume so they always ask for oodles (technical term) of resources.  Only when the application is deployed do they actually know what it is going to utilise in terms of compute and storage resources.  Again I’m interested in understanding do they believe if a VM requires 2 vCPU at 2 GHz and 4GB of RAM they will be 60% utilised.

Many customers will already be using other pieces of software to make decisions for them around VM placement, whether that is vSphere DRS or vRealize Operations Manager or VMTurbo for capacity planning or resource effiency.  So the question is why would I move away from one of these to Cirba and if I do whats the impact?

I’m sure these questions and more will be asked at Virtualisation Field Day 6