VMTurbo ‘invisible hand’ control freak grabs more virty servers (The Register)
By Andrea Meyer on February 18, 2013
by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Register
There are a lot of tools out there to allow system administrators to monitor the various aspects of virtual computing capacity and help them figure out how to manage its use. But VMTurbo wants to get humans out of the way and automate the allocation of resources using the “invisible hand” of market economics – pushing the admins out of the loop. And with Operations Manager 3.3, VMTurbo is once again expanding its range of coverage over virtual infrastructure while at the same time adding some projection capabilities to its control freak.
The basic idea behind the economic scheduling engine inside of VMTurbo’s Operations Manager is simple enough: People, departments, divisions, and groups within a company are given virtual “budgets” from which they can consume resources and together they constitute a market for the limited compute resources available in the data center. As demand for particular resources rise, so does its price, in very appropriate Adam Smith fashion, and similarly, as demand falls, so does the price. The economic engine is not just about virtual billing, but about the placement and timing of workloads to achieve the most efficient use of those scarce resources.