Vizioncore Manages Multiple Virtual Machines

Virtualisation management company Vizioncore has launched vControl, a Web interface to manage virtual machines from multiple vendors, including VMware, Microsoft’s Hyper-V, the open source Xen hypervisor and Sun’s Solaris Zones.

Vizioncore wants to bring self-service capabilities to virtualisation and reduce the management overhead, the company said, by offloading the management tasks from IT administrators, so end users can provision and deploy the VMs using customisable templates, and IT administrators oversee the task through a single interface.

“In VMware it is relatively complicated to create a new virtual machine – and newer ones are still complex,” said Roger Baskervill vice president for EMEA at Vizioncore. Virtualisation providers such as VMware have their own management systems but it adds a lot of effort, if a company uses VMware on its servers, and Citrix VDI for its desktops, he said: “It would be better if you could use one tool.”

The product also supports workflows, has a Web services interface and an SDK (software development kit) to integrate third-party systems, all aimed at driving down administrative costs.

“VMware is still far and away the market leader,” said Baskerville, but multi-hypervisor installations are becoming more common. “Users are slowly shifting towards multi-hypervisor installations, but less than ten percent use something other than VMwre.”

vControl costs from $399 per socket in the US, and is avaiable on a 30 day free trial.