VMware AppSpeed a brief summary.

AppSpeed, is a new product (in Beta) from VMware.
The guys on the VMware Community Roundtable Podcast recently discussed the product with Asaf Wexler, former CTO of B-hive and now Sr Director of R&D at VMware. It is well worth listening too yourself, but I thought it might be of interest to summarise it here too.

VMWare AppSpeed (Formerly B-hive Conductor).
Application monitoring of  Performance
Assure application service levels

Features/Functionality:
Looks at network traffic Passive monitoring of traffic on internal vswitch (port 4095)
1. Application mapping
2. Map transactions of applications. Map user transactions to servers/applications.

Concerns over security, promiscuous mode cards/switches.

How much thu-put and overhead?
- Three probes to three switches
- Performance impact:

What does AppSpeed provide you info wise?

Can it span hosts? If a an application goes across ESX hosts?
Probes + “Brain”
How many hosts can it cover: 50 hosts.
Bandwidth issues.

Useful for single VM application?
Only end-user measurement in that case.

If across VMs, then you can measure performance of communications between tiers.

Protocol based.

—-

AppSpeed looks very much like products like Mazu and Netuitive. Though being a VMware product we can expect it to be able to target VMware more specifically. Monitoring and alerting of issues is a good idea, but I don’t at this stage think that AppSpeed is the best way to go. There are plenty of alternatives that are perhaps more holistic and able to provide a broader picture of your entire infrastructure.

The guys on the podcast rightly grilled Asaf about the security implications of having to use “Promiscuous” mode on you LAN. Also there was some hard questioning about the number of AppSpeed nodes you would need to monitor a large infrastructure as AppSpeed is limited to monitoring 3 virtual switches per VM, so if you are making extensive use of virtual switches you’ll need a lot of AppSpeed nodes.

All this said, AppSpeed is only in Beta. So we shouldn’t judge it based on the present incarnation.

To me, AppSpeed is like several of the ancillary products VMWare does around ESX.
They generally asnwer a specific requirement, rather than providing abroad functionality that all VMware users will want. So I am sure there are people that need AppSpeed badly.