IBM just announced VMControl, a plug-in for the Director management suite, which is free for the IBM customers.
VMControl, available in two editions (Express and Standard) adds management capabilities for multiple hypervisors on top of the Director 6.x platform:
The Express edition just offers very basic management capabilities and Virtual-to-Virtual (V2V) cold migration and it is free.
The Standard edition also offers a template library (Image Manager), which supports the OVF format, and the support for additional virtualization platforms (AIX NIM and System z z/VM).
This richer version costs money (the price is unknown at the moment) and comes as a 60-days trial.
If the tool is worth the money is something that customers will have to verify carefully anyway.
What IBM calls today VMControl is a Director plug-in launched in December 2004 that the company keeps renaming and renaming.
The original name of it was Virtual Machine Manager, released as a free extension for Director 4.20.
IBM took an entire year to upgrade it to version 2.0 and when it was released it only had bug fixes and support for the new Director 5.10.
The plug-in was then renamed one year later, in November 2006, as Virtualization Manager 1.0.
The only new feature that IBM implemented at that time was the experimental support for its own Virtualization Engine on System p and the Novell implementation of Xen.
Now it’s back, almost three years later, under the name of VMControl 2.1.
The experimental support for non-x86 virtualization platforms is now official and the few capabilities that IBM added over 5 years now costs money.