Its capabilities include the ability to provision, activate, and delete virtual servers. You can also issue controlling actions, such as starting, stopping, suspending, or resuming virtual servers.
While Opsware’s previous offerings could create or switch on or off virtual servers as black boxes, the new Virtualization Director can look inside and piece together the hardware and software stacks that are being virtualized.
That means, for instance, if your company has a policy that requires two instances of a system for high availability purposes, the new Opsware offering can peek inside the virtual boxes to ensure that both instances are running on separate machines.
Having such visibility could make a difference for very large-scale deployments involving hundreds of virtual servers.
The first release of Opsware Virtualization Director supports VMware and Solaris 10, and will be available in January. Over the next year, it will extend support to XenSource and Microsoft Virtual Server, followed later in the year by HP UX and IBM AIX logical partitions.
In unrelated news, OpsWare has also concluded an OEM agreement with iConclude, which packages its run book automation tool. The new offering, branded Opsware Orchestrator, allows you to automate a chain of OpsWare tasks that would otherwise have to be performed manually. That includes tasks such as automating resolution of common alerts or scheduling routine maintenance tasks.
