Perfman, the old-line enterprise systems management company, has arrived at virtualization’s door with a new cut of its cross-platform performance and capacity planning software that includes a Virtualization Planning Tool (VPT) and VMware Sprawl Reporting.

The privately held company – around since 1987 – has been finding that 75% of its current sales opportunity are related to virtualization – and it figures that 23% of its total revenues will be virtualization-related by the end of the year.

Its widgetry is supposed to be able to spot a problem in the making two months before it happens, a handy trick that’s based on the years of data Perfman collects.

The latest features complement the widgetry’s existing ability to monitor and manage VMware environments, providing a virtualization lifecycle management solution including discovery, selection, modeling, capacity and performance monitoring and management.

The new Perfman 7.2 release also provides enhanced LPAR modeling for optimizing the use of logically partitioned CPUs.

Perfman’s new CEO Lance Roncalli says, “Virtualization is not a set-and-forget technology. To realize the full benefits of virtualization technology, organizations must continually monitor and adjust their virtual environments for optimal performance.”

Perfman 7.2’s VPT lets admins determine which apps and physical are the best candidates for virtualization and model the expected performance of the virtual environment. The software figures out how many ESX servers are needed and then continues to manage them to ensure sufficient resources are available.

VPT also includes “what if” capabilities to predict performance under new workloads and existing workloads on new hardware.

One user says it found that its SQL servers were using only 2% of their capacity.

Perfman says it can do things that nobody else can like provide an aggregate view of multiple VMware Virtual Centers, peeking into an organization’s entire virtual infrastructure. It can also correlate ESX and guest performance and capacity metrics with guest OS metrics to do root-cause analysis.

Its visibility extends to both physical and virtual servers across VMware, Windows, Linux, Unix and z/OS environments.

Pricing runs $2,000 per server. Figure that buys two sockets and three guests. Ten guests would cost $8k.

Roncalli, the former SVP of sales, marketing and strategy at Maximus, has just replaced company co-founder Jim VanArtsdale as CEO. VanArtsdale remains chairman.