Breaking out of its high-availability computing niche, SIOS Technology Corp. is today announcing a virtualization monitoring and optimization platform tuned to VMware, Inc. environments.

The company, which was founded in 1999 as a maker of clustering software, says its SIOS iQ technology can detect the full realm of devices, processes and relationships in a virtualized environment to identify resource problems as they develop and help administrators pinpoint the source of problems. It will also recommend adjustments to fine-tune resource utilization. The company is initially targeting VMware but will expand to include other virtualization platforms as well as cloud services over the next year.

Virtualization has introduced a new level of complexity into systems management that didn’t exist in the simpler days of purely physical infrastructure, said SIOS Chief Operating Officer Jerry Melnick. Because new virtual machines can be spun up with relative ease, and because resources are dynamically allocated continuously, troubleshooting is a thornier problem.

“You appear to have an infinite resource, but you really don’t,” he said. “There are a lot of relationships to manage, such as multiple VMs sharing the same storage. You really can’t control it from a growth perspective.”

Once downloaded and installed in its own VM, SIOS iQ spiders out through all the resources on the physical machine and consolidates them into a single repository where it can apply advanced analytics. It monitors applications and processes to see what resources they are using and proactively identifies anomalies in behavior. Administrators can adjust thresholds to minimize false alerts.

The company is particularly touting its management dashboard, which can run on a PC or tablet and that uses color-coded status indicators and expandable charts to enable fast problem identification. Analytics features recommend optimized storage and caching allocation, identify idle VMs and snapshot sprawl and include specialized analytics for SQL Server.

Melnick stressed that SIOS iQ is not intended to be a tool for deep root-cause analysis. Rather, “We’re the one that eliminates the finger-pointing so you know what to focus on.”

The platform was designed from the ground up for virtual environments, which Melnick said offers certain advantages over systems rooted in legacy hardware. For example, providing access to host caching to offload the storage area network can impact other virtual machines. “We can give you a simple list of VMs ordered by the ones that can take advantage of host caching most effectively,” he said. “We’ll recommend the amount of cache to allocate and simulate the improvement in performance.”

The reporting function is built on four quality-of-service dimensions: performance, efficiency, reliability and capacity. As machine learning kicks in over time, SIOS iQ can provide better recommendations about how to improve each.

The product is available today. There is a free download and a subscription version list-priced at $150 per month per physical host. There’s no limit on the number of virtual machines a single hosted copy can monitor.