Under the name of vCenter Administrator Portal (VCAP) VMware has silently release the technology preview of one of the most important products of its entire portfolio: a super-console able to centrally manage multiple, independent VMware Infrastructures.
When a product like VI 3.5 is deployed in a large-scale infrastructure there are high chances (because of different security domains for example) that each department will need full ownership of a VirtualCenter and its ESX hosts.
In other cases instead a big provider may want to offer to its customers independent installations.
In both scenarios, without a master management console, keeping the object database consistent across all the departments (or all the customers) is almost impossible.
Any task, even the apparently silly ones like enforcing a common naming convention in the whole company, implies a huge effort and it’s error prone.
The new product is a web console that will aggregate objects and alarms from all the controlled vCenter servers, providing a single sign-on access to every local vCenter Client 2.5.
VMware reports that the product scales well managing up to 10 vCenter servers (and up to 10,000 virtual machines).
The beta program is fully open and the product is currently distributed as an OVF virtual appliance.
No words from VMware at the moment about the release date. VCAP may arrive along with VI 4.0 in Q2 2009.