The buzz around virtualization grew to a roar over the last few weeks in anticipation of VMware's annual conference, which wrapped up last Thursday in Las Vegas. Application acceleration vendors weren’t absent from the frenzy. In particular, Radware unveiled a new product designed to optimize the performance of applications running in virtualized server environments.

Resources are shared in a virtual environment, and tracking the exact capacity that each application requires is more of a challenge, Radware says. Its new VirtualDirector appliance is designed to dynamically allocate resources based on business events, to ensure application performance is keeping up with existing service-level agreements (SLA).

VirtualDirector’s policy engine can be set to take action automatically. For example, the device can trigger systems -- including Radware’s own AppDirector application delivery controllers -- to shift computing and network resources to priority applications. It also can initiate the removal of virtual machines from service to ensure priority applications are performing up to snuff. It tracks business data from end-user transactions to help discern application priority, Radware says.

VirtualDirector can affect the response time of applications running in a virtual environment and improve the end-user experience, said Ilan Kinreich, chief operating officer at Radware, in a Webcast about VirtualDirector.

“It does that by allocating the right resources from the virtualized environment, as the user application needs them,” Kinreich said. “It works in tandem with our [AppDirector] networking solution.”

“The benefit to our customers is really that we are automatically managing and optimizing the whole virtualized environment for them,” he said. “They don’t need to worry about allocation of resources, we are doing that for them based on objectivity, from the network, outside the virtualized environment, and making sure that the right resources are there at the right time.”

As companies get started with the technology, VirtualDirector can be deployed in an advisory mode and provide guidance on what actions should be taken to best optimize application performance. For companies that are migrating applications from dedicated servers to a virtual environment, VirtualDirector can help monitor the impact of the migration, such as any performance degradation.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.