Virtualization seems to be getting a lot of bad press these days. With energy costs set to rise as demand outstrips supply, and carbon emission legislation looking more and more likely in the US, Virtualization was at first seen as a savior of hard pressed data centers who were near to capacity with no place to go.

However at the recent Data Center Dynamics conference in San Francisco , several speakers voiced concerns over the usefulness of virtualization as demand for more and more server (and therefore energy) capacity shows no signs of abating.

As Gary Brennen, co-CEO of data center construction company Syska Hennessy stated - "For our clients, virtualization was perceived as a solution to all the ills, but what we've seen over the past few years is not a slowdown in growth. If anything, we see companies asking how they can get more kilowatts -- today"

Steven Press, executive director for data center facilities at health insurance giant Kaiser Permanente, agreed that virtualization is no panacea. "It's one of many tools we have to curtail growth and energy consumption, but I don't see it as the be-all and end-all."

This recent trend for 'Virtualization Bashing‘ is starting to grate a little with me now. As VMware partners, 1E is firmly behind Virtualization as a key tool in the fight against ever expanding energy consumption in the Data Center. Like all great technologies, it just has to be managed well to avoid the pitfalls of inefficient implementation and management.

In NightWatchman Server Edition 2.0 (NWSE) we've poured a lot of time and effort into providing even more ways of maintaining control over your Virtual Environment as well as the real world of physical servers in the Data Center.

Take the Cloud for example. As more and more business applications migrate to the Cloud, the ability to monitor individual Virtual Servers becomes more pressing. In NWSE2.0 we've expended the 'Useful Work' analysis to Virtual Machines, so that you can see exactly which of those VMs is behaving badly. In a scenario where multiple customers using multiple virtual servers may be sharing the same physical server, energy use becomes more of an issue too. Previously NightWatchman used to monitor the power consumption of individual physical servers, which is great when you own all of the hardware, but is less useful in large co-hosting or chargeback setups. Addressing this concern, we can now monitor the power consumption of individual Virtual Machines so that you can identify and monitor the most power hungry and possibly even charge for VM usage based on energy consumption. This screen shot below shows you what you might see in the NWSE console.

This new level of granularity of reporting and control is proving to be a big hit with customers. With the ever increasing demand for more and more of everything in the Data center, every Kilowatt counts, and NightWatchman Server Edition can make sure that those kilowatts are reliably accounted for.