The Future of Multi-Hypervisor Management: A New Approach

As day-to-day VMware vSphere admins, we often get so focused on our specific environment that we fail to see the bigger picture. Recently, I had an epiphany during Embotics’ presentation at Tech Field Day #6 in Boston. They mentioned their plan to support other architectures in future versions, which made me realize that we might be approaching multi-hypervisor management entirely wrong.

Currently, our approach is to have different management tools for each hypervisor, such as vSphere, Hyper-V, and XenServer. This leads to a fragmented environment where administrators have to use multiple tools to manage their infrastructure. Why should 3rd party vendors have to tie into the hypervisors’ management tools? Instead, what if the hypervisor vendors made their admin tools available in a manner that let 3rd party vendors integrate their management tool into theirs?

Solarwinds does something interesting with their Virtualization Manager product. They provide statistics and status reports as web “widgets” that can be included in other web pages. What if we could do the same with output from future VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer management products? VKernel could also do the same for their data. This would allow us to create our own dashboards with information from multiple sources.

Of course, there are challenges to this approach, such as moving workloads between different hypervisors or enforcing security between them. However, I believe that the need for management tools to be hypervisor agnostic is very much present and will only grow in the future. We as vAdmins need to apply pressure on our hypervisor vendors to open up their management tools in such a way that this could be possible someday.

In conclusion, the current approach of having separate management tools for each hypervisor is not sustainable in the long run. Instead, we should focus on creating a more unified and integrated management framework that can handle multi-hypervisor environments. This will require cooperation from all parties involved, but it is essential to provide a better experience for our businesses and applications. As vAdmins, let’s keep pushing for this future and make sure our voices are heard.