[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mrk9rOED_gY&w=560&h=349]

Lots of awards were given out at Interop, but VMWare won the grand prize for vCenter Operations Standard, a product that runs performance analytics for vSphere-virtualized environments. It essentially gives you a better, deeper view, and shows relationships between VMs, ESX’s, clusters, data centers and the virtual center. It’s one of the nicest visual designs of a monitoring application I’ve ever seen. The dashboard identifies problem areas by monitoring workload, health and capacity. If you have a heavy workload, you can identify the virtual machine that’s in trouble, and see specifically what’s wrong, like maybe a particular disk on the VM. Watch my demo with Hassan Fahimi of VMWare.