At the end of December virtualization.info highlighted how Vizioncore, the most loyal VMware partner, is taking a new direction.
Its opening to other virtualization vendors in part depends on Quest, which is a management company close to Microsoft, Oracle and others, in part depends on the VMware behavior, in part depends on the new opportunities that Hyper-V and XenServer can offer (there’s a reason if Quest hired the Citrix VP of Product Development).
Besides the evidence we collected anyway, Vizioncore never offered a clear indication of where it’s going. Something that was probably expected by many customers after Quest completed its acquisition in January 2008.
Last week the company finally made its new strategy clear announcing a couple of upcoming products: vControl and VESI.
vControl is an enterprise management product that will support VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V.
It will provide a self-service provisioning portal for end-users and task-based automation tools for administrators.
VESI (or Virtualization EcoShell Initiative) is a free extension of the Quest PowerGUI, the freeware Microsoft PowerShell IDE, specifically tailored for virtualization professionals.
It will support both VMware vCenter and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, both offering extensive PowerShell cmdlets (Citrix XenEssentials may be supported at a later time).
More than that VESI will feature some cool features like:
- Optimize administrative tasks by performing bulk tasks across any size VMware environment
- Configuration
- Power
- Inventory
- Create professional documentation of a VMware environment to view Host, VM, Storage, and Network configurations and easily identify potential configuration issues
- Track and report changes to the VMware environment to assist in determining root cause analysis while troubleshooting the environment
- Create and generate custom reports on any aspect of the VMware environment or virtualized workloads
Vizioncore aims at building a community around the new IDE, so that members will be able to share and extend the scripts developed by others.
It’s easy to figure out how the company itself will draw the best scripts and developers to enrich the upcoming vControl.
So Vizioncore is morphing from the trusted backup/recovery company for VMware into a management and orchestration company available for every leading hypervisor.
Expect further integration and consolidation of the company portfolio because it’s now clear where the vendor is going.