I have meant to blog about this for a while now, but with Christmas and NY in the way I have finally got round to it! Just before Christmas Microsoft acquired Opalis Software, and with it Microsoft will bring to their virtualisation platform and data centre management expertise a greater automation capability.
The company did not disclose any financial details of the transaction, but said that it would help augment its System Center line of management software.
Datacenter orchestration is one of the most important areas where virtualisation will grow and expand in the coming years as the virtualisation platforms and technology matures. The need for such a tool will become more evident as virtualisation implementations continue to scale out and increase in complexity.
Opalis technology can help these growing virtualised, dynamic datacenters with the following:
- Run book: Automate maintenance and administrative tasks that are repeated over and over again
- Provisioning: An orchestration tool can help automate the configuration, deployment, and provisioning of server, storage, or network resources across the physical, virtual, or cloud environment
- Virtual service management: Automate virtual lifecycle management to control sprawl
- Deep integration: Orchestrate tasks across server infrastructure and systems management products to help with the physical, virtual, and cloud.
Automation has been and will continue to be a key focus for virtualisation players and will be deeply entwined into the management platform for their hypervisors. VMware have Orchestrator and Citrix has Workflow Studio.