HotLink extends virtualization heterogeneous management to Amazon EC2, CloudStack

HotLink, a server virtualization management startup that came out of stealth mode a year ago at VMworld 2011, is on a mission to transform real-world IT with the industry’s first true heterogeneous data center system management platform for virtual, cloud, and physical computing infrastructures.

Building on its SuperVisor product, announced last year, HotLink is ready to show off its latest innovation called Hybrid Express for VMware vCenter. The new technology is said to simplify the management of hybrid clouds through a VMware vCenter plug-in that natively supports Amazon EC2 and CloudStack resources full function, without the need for other management console prerequisites. Hybrid Express expands the ecosystem of HotLink’s heterogeneous data center system management capabilities to a new audience while providing their current customers with even more options.

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HotLink was founded in early 2010 by data center software veterans Lynn LeBlanc and Richard Offer, founders of FastScale Technology, which was acquired by EMC in 2009 and later transferred to VMware.

LeBlanc and Offer used VMworld 2011 to showcase HotLink’s SuperVisor for VMware vCenter, which takes a different approach to centralized management of multiple virtualization platforms; instead of using more than one management tool or overlays that try to glue different consoles together, HotLink made one console do the work of the others. To make that happen, HotLink’s transformation engine technology abstracts and decouples the virtual infrastructure metadata from the virtualization management layer to enable native interoperability of hypervisors. It can basically translate operational hypervisor system commands into a common form understood by other hypervisors, making it possible for administrators to manage Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Red Hat KVM from within VMware vCenter.

HotLink SuperVisor was designed with a plug-in architecture to extend the platform vendors’ virtualization management solutions. The first plug-in was created for VMware vCenter — the obvious choice since it is currently the de facto standard of management platforms for virtualized environments. The company has stated in the past that it would do the same for other virtualization management platforms, such as Microsoft System Center, Citrix XenCenter, and Red Hat’s Enterprise Virtualization Manager. However, work on these other platforms has yet to materialize.

Instead, the company’s next steps are focused on moving to the public cloud. HotLink will extend the platform even further, this time moving outside of the data center to manage Amazon EC2 and CloudStack cloud environments.

“HotLink Hybrid Express is the only solution to natively extend VMware vCenter to public clouds, so existing VMware users can consolidate deployment, administration and management of all on and off-premise resources with a single pane of glass, VMware vCenter,” said Jerry McLeod, vice president of marketing at HotLink. “HotLink’s unique transformation technology abstracts public cloud platforms and workloads so VMware vCenter treats them just like vSphere hosts and VMs, which fully integrates and manages as a unified pool of resources. And because HotLink natively integrates cloud resources, VMware vCenter compatible orchestration tools, service catalogs and self-service portals work seamlessly.”

With Hybrid Express, public cloud workloads can benefit from the same VMware vCenter techniques as on-premise virtual machines. Users can clone, snapshot, and migrate cloud instances just as they do today. HotLink’s integrated, bidirectional workload conversion enables seamless migration to and from Amazon EC2 and CloudStack.U sers can also deploy cloud instances from existing VMware vCenter templates and readily share those templates with other team members. With the combination of VMware vCenter and HotLink, VMware users have the familiar deployment and management interface of on-premise, with hybrid cloud flexibility and agility.

HotLink Hybrid Express is being positioned as a seamless and easy-to-use tool. According to the company, it breaks installation time barriers by reducing a process that could take days to implement and instead streamline it down to hours. Once installed, the system requires no additional management console, and all functions are consolidated within VMware vCenter. The product incorporates itself into the organization’s environment and eliminates the necessity for training or procedural variations.

The HotLink Hybrid Express tool can be used in standalone mode to control virtual infrastructures running on Amazon EC2 or CloudStack clouds. But for customers with hybrid needs that also includes on-premise multihypervisor support, this latest tool can also be combined with HotLink SuperVisor for VMware vCenter to provide full-function, unified management of all on- and off-premise heterogeneous resources, making VMware vCenter a single point of management for VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, Red Hat KVM, Amazon EC2, and CloudStack.

McLeod told InfoWorld that the latest challenges around mixed cloud and virtual environments are ease-of-use and compliance to company standards. “IT does not have the time or desire to learn how the various hyperVisors or public clouds work — nor should they have to — as it should be an easy extension of their current on premise management environment, not a standalone set of servers and workloads managed by yet another management console or set of APIs or commands,” added McLeod. “The whole concept should be to use the resources seamlessly at will as a huge available on demand pool.”

Furthermore, McLeod stated that IT has designed builds and templates that meet standards and they don’t want to maintain other builds just because they are on different hypervisors or “in the cloud.” The same builds should be able to easily move to and from private and public resource pools.

IT also wants all the data center integration it has invested in on the private cloud to be leveraged when it moves workloads around either in the private cloud or to the public cloud. “They need and require change management tracking, reporting, alarming, and all the other tools they are used to having in order to work to company standards and SLAs,” said McLeod. “HotLink Hybrid Express was designed to meet and exceed these challenges.”

Like the company’s SuperVisor product, HotLink Hybrid Express doesn’t come cheap. HotLink licenses its software in both perpetual and subscription models, and the company offers a starter bundle at $7,500.

While the technology itself is very interesting, one question remains: Is HotLink too early to market with Hybrid Express? Is it solving a problem that doesn’t yet exist? Or now that this type of technology does exist, will more people start adopting a public cloud or, more specifically, a CloudStack environment?

For those individuals or companies attending VMworld 2012 in San Francisco next week, check out HotLink’s booth at the show to get an up-close and personal look at the technology and see it in action. And then you can judge for yourself.

Make sure to follow me on Twitter during VMworld 2012 for live Tweeting at the event — @vmblogcom.

This article, “HotLink extends virtualization heterogeneous management to Amazon EC2, CloudStack,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.