The VMware AppSpeed BETA has been released and running for a little over a week now.  We are about to get it tuned up in many different environments to really get a test of the applications abilities.  In this installment of the VMWare AppSpeed BETA review we will provide insight on the ease of installation and setup for the product and our impressions on how the product delivered.   We will also touch on some of the intial features such as the network topology map and how it can provide increased visibility into yout environment. <!--more-->

The installer is delivered as an OVF file that can be imported in Virtual Center using the Import Appliance from file method.

Our initial import/configuration went as smooth as possible.  The menus were intuitive and the installation documentation that comes with the product is full of step by step procedures on how to get the AppSpeed Brain up and running.  Once the Brain was installed, it was time to install the plugin.   AppSpeed is accessed in Virtual Infrastructure Clients (VIClient) through the use of the AppSpeed Plugins.  Once the AppSpeed plugin is downloaded to a given machine and enabled you will see an AppSpeed Icon that takes you to the management and anlaysis sections.   The installation and the download/activation of the plugin went as smoothly as the AppSpeed Brain installation and startup.

Once inside the management area of AppSpeed the next step was to create the AppSpeed probes.  You will remember from the previous AppSpeed post that the probes are created on the ESX servers and one probe can monitor up to 3 vSwitchs at a time.  There is also an option for full installs that allows you to install a probe on all ESX hosts in one shot to save the time of having to do it individually.  Great feature for those of you that have many many ESX hosts in your environment.  Once all the probes were set up and pointing at their assigned vSwitchs the magic then starts to happen.

We will cover VMWare AppSpeed analysis more in depth in a later post but we were very impressed with how quickly the probes were able to identify the different entities in our environment and start adding the automatically as applications.  The first ones were the heavier used applications like Exchange, MSSQL, HTTP sites...  Then came some of the other applications CRM, Web Services, smaller MSSQL installations, etc...  All while creating a drillable topography of your network environment and it's interactions.  You can click on each node or link in the network diagram and see exactly what traffic (fairly detailed as well) has passed through between those servers.  Gone are the days of "Let's turn this box off and see who screams!".  With AppSpeed you can quickly identify what applcations and processes are utilizing a given server.

The constant up to date  network topography map is only one of the benefits of an AppSpeed install.  We will get more in depth with analyzing the performance of those connections between servers in a future post as well as how detailed the analysis can be.  As a developer I was very excited to see "SELECT ... FROM ... WHERE ...." kind of detail on the analysis with current/max/average error time, latency, execution time, resource usage, etc... on that level.  Time to start cleaning up some underperforming SQL statements!

Check back with us next week for a closer in depth look at analysis features in VMWare AppSpeed BETA.