HotLink SuperVisor brings multihypervisor support to VMware vCenter

Ever since VMware first began changing its vSphere 5.0 pricing model to include a cost for virtual memory (dubbed the “vRAM tax” by competitors and angry users alike), many organizations have questioned whether they should rely on VMware vSphere as their sole virtualization platform and began to take a second look at server virtualization offerings from Citrix, Microsoft, and Red Hat.

While these investigations were primary driven by upper management as a cost-savings measure, decision makers may also fear vendor lock-in as more and more physical servers (including mission-critcal servers) were being migrated to virtual servers on the VMware hypervisor platform. While a heterogeneous virtual data center may look good on paper, the management complexity that comes with using multiple virtualization platforms in the same environment can be a nightmare.

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There are lots of third-party software companies trying to solve the heterogeneous virtualization management nightmare, but VMware vCenter is still the gold standard for most users. If there’s one thing I’ve learned after years of speaking with VMware administrators, it’s that you will have to pry VMware vCenter from their cold, dead hands. It may not be perfect, and it doesn’t solve all problems, but vCenter has become a management tool they simply cannot live without.

But VMware isn’t interested in managing competitors’ hypervisors within vCenter. Doing so would validate these other platforms, and I don’t see that happening anytime soon. Where does that leave administrators who want to minimize the number of management tools they have to use to manage a hetergeneous environment?

VMware may not be ready to manage other hypervisor platforms from within their own management application, but that tiny issue is being overlooked by a company called HotLink, which came out of stealth mode last year after launching SuperVisor for VMware during VMworld 2011.

HotLink has taken 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 makes 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 the deployed management platform for virtualized environments. The next obvious step for HotLink would be to create SuperVisor for Microsoft and integrate it with System Center Virtual Machine Manager, then perhaps expand the platform to work with public clouds, including those from Amazon Web Services and Rackspace.

Earlier versions of SuperVisor for VMware carried out basic virtualization management functions (such as powering virtual machines on and off, VM cloning, and workload conversions) from vCenter for all VMs running on vSphere as well as Citrix, Microsoft, and Red Hat platforms. The company recently announced the newest release of its flagship product, HotLink SuperVisor for VMware 1.5. With SuperVisor for VMware 1.5, the company said it was building on its technology to deliver on the advanced features of VMware vCenter.

Three key features added to SuperVisor for VMware 1.5 include:

• Snapshot Manager, which gives administrators the ability to create, utilize, and manage cross-platform snapshots inside the VMware vCenter console, providing a single point of management for heterogeneous virtual machines
• Template Manager, which enables users to create and deploy a single template across all target hypervisors, eliminating the redundancy of building and maintaining multiple platform-specific virtual machine templates
• Homogeneous Live Migration, which allows VMware vMotion capabilities to be utilized for cross-platform, critical workloads — vCenter will be able to manage the live migration of Hyper-V, XenServer and KVM virtual machines within homogeneous clusters (for example, from Hyper-V host to Hyper-V host, or from XenServer host to XenServer host)

The homogeneous live migration feature is a nice addition. However, keeping live migrations locked to a particular platform is still limiting. In this day and age where we want it our way and we want it now, wouldn’t it be great if virtual machines could be live migrated from one host to another without worrying about the underlying platform type? That way, we could migrate a VMware virtual machine to a Hyper-V or XenServer platform (or vice versa) if it were the better choice.

This feat may not be easy, but it’s also not science fiction. In fact, HotLink CEO Lynn LeBlanc hinted that her team may be working on this very thing, saying that this barrier may be broken by an on-the-fly virtual-to-virtual (V2V) migration. Stay tuned.

While all of this sounds great, it’s important to remember that this is technology, not magic pixie dust. The software does a lot of things, but it can’t make Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, and Red Hat KVM do things that only VMware vSphere currently has the capabilities to do. These other platforms have advanced over the years, but they’re still playing catchup with VMware. There are a number of VMware-specific features, like Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS), that HotLink can’t extend to the other platforms on its own.

HotLink sells SuperVisor for VMware with either a perpetual license or an annual subscription license (a new option with the latest 1.5 release). To get things moving, the company offers a starter kit with the SuperVisor server and the ability to manage five physical hosts running non-VMware hypervisors at a cost of $25,000 for the perpetual license while the annual subscription starts at $6,000 for the same number of hosts.

As you can see, the technology doesn’t come cheap. Do you save money moving non-mission-critical workloads onto one of these cheaper alternative hypervisors but still managing them from VMware vCenter thanks to HotLink? You’ll have to do the math.  But no matter which way you slice it, moving to a heterogeneous hypervisor environment is going to add a cost somewhere. Make sure you weigh all the costs associated with every option.

Does this look like something your organization would purchase and use? Are you one of those VMware administrators who refuses to give up VMware vCenter? If you could still use VMware vCenter to manage alternative hypervisor platforms, would that make you consider going heterogeneous in your virtual data center? Let me know what you think.

This article, “HotLink SuperVisor brings multihypervisor support to VMware vCenter,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.