While waiting for VMware Infrastructure 3.1 beta program, worldwide customers may start wondering what the term VI Ops hides:
At the moment virtualization.info has no informations about this new thing, but, assuming it’s a new add-on for VMware Infrastructure 3, it may be a self-service provisioning system (Ops may be the shorthand for Operators), like the one Microsoft introduced with its System Center Virtual Machine Manager beta 1.
VI Ops, whatever it is, has to be added to a misterious codename Integrity virtualization.info discovered in June 2006 and which is still unveiled.
Update: This article from SearchServerVirtualization confirms VMware efforts in provisioning space, already started in June 2006 with Akimbi acquisition and subsequent release of Lab Manager 2.4:
[The second category] is management and automation solutions — for example, resource optimization and virtual machine lifecycle management, which looks at how you provision, change/modify and de-provision a virtual machine — the kind of stuff you need to do to prevent server sprawl. We have all the core functionality today, but we want to tie in a nice end-user workflow capability.