The new offering, Cassatt Cross-Virtualization Manager (XVM), is a plug-in to the company’s Collage flagship offering. It will support the major hypervisors including VMware ESX, VMware Server, Xen, and Microsoft Virtual Server.
In effect, it complements the capabilities that Cassatt Collage already offers. Today, you can use Collage to provision or virtualize multiple OSs, applications, and J2EE instances within a single server or a bank of servers.
Collage automatically redeploys server resources when capacity is stretched by expected or unexpected traffic spikes. It relies on a control engine that is housed on an Intel server that accesses a repository of system or software images that are retained in a storage network.
More importantly, Collage lets you automatically provision physical and virtual servers from the same console. Provisioning can be automated based on rules or policies so that resources can be redeployed on the fly without human intervention.
With XVM, you can use that same capability to provision the multiple virtual containers that may sit inside a single server.
The Cassatt Collage Cross-Virtualization Manager (XVM) with support for VMware ESX and VMware Server is available now. Support for Xen is planned for June 2006, with Microsoft Virtual Server to follow later in the year.
