VMWare AppSpeed is on the horizon and will be compatible with ESX 3.5 and 4.0.  For those who haven't heard about AppSpeed.  AppSpeed passively monitors key performance indicators (cpu, memory, network, etc...) at the application level in the VMWare virtual environment.  It even has the ability to monitor physical servers as well.   Below is a short list of planned AppSpeed features and compatibility.<!--more-->
<ul>
	<li>Increase application performance and uptime</li>
	<li>Substantially improve consolidation ratios by ensuring that VMs are not over-provisioned with more resources than needed to meet SLAs</li>
	<li>Dramatically reduce hours spent per server managing resources and wasted trying to troubleshoot and resolve performance “issues”</li>
	<li>Virtualize more and faster</li>
	<li>Create End-to-end Logical to Physical Discovery and Mapping</li>
	<li>Monitor Performance &amp; Service Level Agreement Achievement</li>
	<li>Identify Root Causes of Performance Issues</li>
	<li>Remediate Performance Issues &amp; Automate Common Solutions</li>
</ul>
An AppSpeed installation consists of the AppSpeed Brain which will be delivered as an OVF file preconfigured and ready to create the Brain Virtual Machine.  In order to set up the AppSpeed Brain you will need at least 50GB of Hard Disk space and 1GB of RAM to assign to the VM.  Each probe created will consume another 500MB of HD space and 256MB of RAM.

The potential for this application and being able to gather more information fine tune application and database servers will increase your environments capacity and application performance.  Stay tuned into blogs.egroup-us.com for more information and screenshots as the BETA starts soon.

Read more about AppSpeed at VMWare's site. <a href="http://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-appspeed/">http://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-appspeed/</a>