VKernel announced a partnership with Lighthouse Virtualization Group. Under the agreement, Lighthouse becomes a VKernel Gold Partner that will resell VKernel's Suite of Virtual Appliances for analyzing and monitoring capacity, implementing chargeback, and gaining cost visibility in VMware ESX environments and build services to support its "Green IT" initiative.

"As Organizations continue to virtualize their data centers, they need visibility into resource utilization to properly plan their virtual infrastructures, ensure optimal performance, and enable IT to have an accurate cost of each virtual machine," said Alex Bakman, founder and CEO of VKernel. "Our solutions are a great fit for Lighthouse as they rapidly address critical issues within the virtual data center to deliver instantaneous value and benefits to Lighthouse and its customer base."

The VKernel Virtual Appliance Suite for Systems Management is a set of "plug-and-play" virtual appliances designed to address real world systems management challenges as organizations migrate to VMware virtual environments. VKernel products enable IT groups to solve today's critical pain points by providing visibility into the capacity and resource consumption of each virtual machine. VKernel is currently offering a Chargeback Virtual Appliance for gaining cost visibility and implementing chargeback, and a Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer Virtual Appliance for identifying and eliminating capacity bottlenecks.

"Lighthouse differentiates itself by understanding the impact that virtualization has on an organization's entire environment. By not addressing the organization as a whole, the cost savings inherent to a virtualization strategy will not be recognized. Operational readiness which encompasses the processes and procedures that a company needs to address prior to virtualizing needs to be considered," said Peter Heigis, managing partner for the Lighthouse Virtualization Group. "VKernel completes the Virtualization Methodology Lifecycle and enables companies to proactively address the management challenges to ensure that capacity planning in the virtual world does not meet the same fate as seen in the physical world of over procurement and underutilization."

Virtual Infrastructure provides business benefits such as server consolidation, creating significant up-front and on-going savings, potentially eliminating the need to buy additional server hardware as well as costly add- ons such as SAN connections and air conditioning units. Lighthouse can assist organizations to significantly reduce the number of servers which has a powerful, positive impact on electricity costs, and minimize the data center space needed to house servers.

In addressing the business challenges associated with such issues as limited server space or capacity for power and cooling, Lighthouse Virtualization Group can assist an enterprise's efforts to increase IT infrastructure resource utilization through virtualization technologies. By leveraging virtualization management technologies, such as VKernel, Lighthouse can also enable the roll-out of new virtual machines with less risk, lower costs, and efficiently allocate shared resource capacity to maximize the performance of VMware ESX servers.