The Platform VM Orchestrator (VMO - pronounced VeeMO) provides for the Enterprise a means to both deploy and manage XenServer virtual machines. The initial product is itself deployed as a pre-packaged XenServer virtual appliance--the VMO Management Server--which can be imported into an existing XenServer environment.

The architecture of the product is such that it integrates with the hypervisor while not actually being based on the hypervisor; a plug-in like architecture that leads the vendor to proclaim it as "hypervisor neutral." The vendor's Web site further states that support "... for VMware ESX, Microsoft HyperV, open source Xen, KVM will be available in the coming months."

VMO enables both the self-service deployment of virtual machines to pool resources (physical XenServer machines), as well as monitoring and load-balancing of deployed VMs. A self service portal and corresponding role-based access controls enable individuals to provision and deploy VMs as per their needs; while a built-in policy engine periodically examines the load of existing VMs, automatically migrating the VM to a different physical machine when defined thresholds are exceeded. Policies can be defined at the cluster (all hosts under VMO), consumer, host, and VM level; and each policy defines its own thresholds, rules, actions, run interval, and optional E-mail alerts.

Both end users and admins access VMO through the same Web-based management portal, with role-based access settings limiting the available options to end users. Admins can further be separated into Cluster Administrators (full access) and Consumer Administrators (delegated access to only their own consumers; a "Consumer" is typically mapped to an organization department or project and provides a logical separation between virtual machines; a Consumer Administrator can manage only those machines within their Consumer definition). Resource Plans are defined to map the physical resources available to each Consumer; i.e., though they are logically separated, multiple Consumers can share the same virtual environment, governed by the available resources as defined in their Resource Plans.

In addition to the monitoring and load-balancing of individual VMs as described above, VMO also provides HA features in that the VMs running on a failed host can be automatically migrated to and restarted on other working hosts within the virtual environment. Additionally, the VMO Management Server itself can be installed on multiple hosts, with support for failover to one of the standby servers in the event the primary VMO Management Server fails.

Other VMO features include activity auditing (including event date and time, triggering user, event type, and description); support for the sending of activity details to 3rd party platforms via SNMP; and a report engine that can display host utilization details and consumer allocation/usage charts.

As mentioned above, additional hypervisors beyond XenServer are expected to be supported; and in that light the vendor has announced their new Virtual Computing Cluster platform, which combines VMO, VMware Virtual Infrastructure, and the vendor's Platform LSF (for managing batch workloads). Virtual Computing Cluster allows for the scheduling, placement, and running of jobs in VMware-based virtual clusters.

Contact Platform Computing for further information.

product submission by EITPlanet Staff

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