Recent VMworld conference left a feeling of VMware gradually adopting Microsoft Steve Ballmer’s “Developers, developers, developers!” approach for automating VMware’s virtual infrastructures. While VMware itself is working on building full suite of software targeted to free Virtual Infrastructure (VI) administrators from everydays’ routine tasks, it also encourages other companies and independent developers to create their own products for automation of different virtual infrastructure areas. Many of such companies were exhibiting their products or even having sessions scheduled on this conference.
Just a few years ago there were almost no third-party tools available and VMware was putting most of their effort into improving the virtualization platform itself. So, for example, ByteLife had to develop a solution to automate virtual machines’ datacenter failover process for one of our clients since VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager was not yet available. Nowadays the number of such solutions available on market is so big, that it takes time to select the best suitable product for a specific need. And since the Application Programming Interface (API) for VMware products is open and well documented, anybody can develop their own software packages for any specific purpose if existing software doesn’t suit well there. Specially for such cases VMware organized several sessions dedicated to the usage of API and different software development tools meant to programaticaly control virtual resources.
Automation is, with no doubt, one of the key factors for success in building and managing large virtual environments and Cloud Infrastructures, and VMware showed that very clearly during the conference.