In March the Quest subsidiary Vizioncore started the execution of a new strategy to break free from its symbiosis with VMware.
So far the most important step of that execution has been the launch of a new product called vControl, a management console which supports multiple hypervisors and it’s ready for data center orchestration.
The first public version of vControl, released in May, introduced some interesting features and the broad support for VMware, Citrix and Microsoft hypervisors.
Anyway somebody at Vizioncore must have decided that the $399/socket pricing wasn’t aggressive enough, so, with a surprising move during the VMware’s VMworld 2009 conference, the company announced the release of the core features of vControl as freeware.
Basically Vizioncore is giving away for free the management console of vControl, while the $399/socket pricing is just applied to the automation engine.
In this way the company does exactly the opposite of VMware, which charges for the management console (vCenter) and offers the automation engine for free (vCenter Orchestrator).
vControl is just the beginning. Vizioncore also released for free vConverter Server Consolidation (SC) and vOptimizer WasteFinder.
Compared to the full version of vConverter, this SC edition doesn’t offer P2V/V2V incremental migration and live migrations (both considered the core feature for disaster recovery), but it still offers file or block-level cloning, parallel conversions, support for VMware RDM format and more.
Additionally, like vControl, also vConverter SC supports ESX, XenServer and Hyper-V.
The last one, WasteFinder, is a subset of the vOptimizer Pro product, which only does two things: it scans the vCenter database to find allocated and wasted virtual storage and to find those virtual machines that are not aligned on 64K partition boundaries.
The key difference with the fully-featured product is that WasteFinder cannot actually reclaim the wasted space or realign the VMs after the first two operations.