vCenter gains power to manage multiple clouds

Better the control freak you know as you hybridise, suggests HotLink Corp

Server virtualization management tool maker HotLink has enhanced the cloudy capabilities of VMware's vCenter by giving it the power to manage multiple public clouds.

The company's new Cloud Management Express imbues vCenter with the power to manage VMs in Microsoft Azure, vCloud Air, OpenStack and Amazon EC2, and also to wrangle on-premises OpenStack, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer and Red Hat KVM.

The idea here is pretty simple: if you use vCenter and other clouds or hypervisors, it may well be convenient to use one management tool rather than a handful. VMware's market share remains colossal and chances are you therefore own and use vCenter, so why not use it to manage all your VMs no matter where they live? Throw in the fact that we're all apparently heading towards a hybrid cloud and/or multi-hypervisor future and the ability to put vCenter to work with multiple clouds enhances its utility while reducing the amount of new stuff you need to wrap your head around.

HotLink says VMs from places other than vSphere appear in vCenter's unified inventory tree as just another host or guest. XML translation is the key to pulling off that trick: HotLink has sussed the metadata different types of VM generate and ensures it is translated into a format vCenter expects to see from a vSphere VM. An agent on managed VMs provides the hooks required to let vCenter wrangle different types of VM.

You can get your hands on Cloud Management Express for US$175 per workload per year for 150 workloads. ®