Zenoss Fills VMware vCloud Director Gap

By previewing support for VMware vCloud Director, Zenoss is adding a management layer on top of the VMware orchestration engine to make this new VMware capability more accessible to IT managers, said Chet Luther, chief cloud architect for Zenoss.

Zenoss is positioning itself as a neutral platform for managing cloud computing environments. In addition to VMware, the company’s tool monitors Xen, KVM, Microsoft Hyper-V, Parallel OpenVZ, Oracle Virtualbox environments running on cloud infrastructure from Amazon Web Services, Google AppEngine, Memchache, AMQP used by RabbitMQ VMware's open source ESB, OpenNebula, and Ganglia.

According to Chet Luther, cloud architect for Zenoss, the ability to monitor application performance across multiple clouds of computing will become more critical as cloud computing continues to evolve. In the meantime, he said IT organizations are looking for one tool to provide guidance on the performance of their applications running on various virtual stacks of IT infrastructure. Without that guidance, he added, many IT organizations are having trouble getting past deploying simple applications on virtual servers because application owners doubt the performance of virtual server environments.