Vizioncore, the virtualisation software arm of enterprise systems management vendor Quest Software Inc, has produced a virtual machine (VM) management tool to bring more order, control and automation to the VM lifecycle.
Launching vControl, which is good for VMware ESX/ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer and Sun Solaris Zones virtualisation environments, the company said the system should simplify “some of the administrative headaches of VM management.”
Roger Baskerville VP for Emea for Vizioncore told us, “vControl can take various VM creation processes and develop a single-click workflow from them.” By automatically creating a VM, the system ensures that it complies to standards set by a company or an administrator, and will then track it through its lifecycle. “It makes it easier to deploy virtual machines, and helps de-skill the operation.”
The vControl management provides self-service provisioning, multi-VM control and task-based automation in a way that should help reduce VM administration costs and improve consistency, according to Vizioncore.
“It offers users the power to dramatically reduce time wasted on unnecessary repetitive tasks across multiple platforms and to help reduce common administrative errors.”
The system builds easy-to-trigger workflows, providing task-based administration for multiple VMs, and which allows administrators to perform various actions for a single VM, or on multiple VMs to reduce time and effort.
Content from our partners
It will also discover hosts and VMs that exist within an identified IP range, so that administrators can easily identify and provision infrastructure resources.
Vizioncore now has a suite of virtualisation management tools that stretches across the lifecycle and addresses conversion and deployment of VMs with vConverter, disaster recovery and high availability with vRangePro, it has Foglight Pro for monitoring VMs, and Optimiser Pro that handles system optimisation procedures. Any customer buying three or more of the products qualifies for discounts of up to 40%, the company said.
All of its products are intended to add value to the available hypervisor platforms, and some of the features on offer do overlap with some of the basic functionality that comes with those platforms.
A market leader in virtualisation data protection, Vizioncore believes its lifecycle approach and hypervisor agnosticism puts it in a place in the market where it can live alongside the virtualisation platform suppliers, rather as being seen to competing against them.
Its customers range from banks and the very largest enterprise, to small mid-cap businesses, who can spend anything from $2,000 to $100,000. The company suggested a typical deal size would be around $50,000.
Tools like Vizioncore’s, and Embotics produces another virtualisation lifecycle range, not only foster standardisation and consistency in the virtual environment, but they help address the issue of VM sprawl.
Baskerville said, “It is a real issue. Some administrators are not sure where all their VMs were created, why they were created, and if they should or should not be decommissioned.”
He added, “Dormant VMs can lead to unnecessary use of server resources, and can also impact on the performance of other VMs running on the server. Left unchecked, it will only negate the benefits that virtualisation can bring.”
