Hotlink: The Multi-Hypervisor Management Tool for Your Internal Virtualization Infrastructure
As I was walking around the VMworld 2012 exhibition hall, I stumbled upon a booth that caught my attention – Hotlink. I had never heard of them before, but after talking to their CEO, Lynn LeBlanc, and seeing their product demo, I was impressed with what they have to offer. In this blog post, I’ll share with you what I learned about Hotlink and their innovative approach to multi-hypervisor management.
Hotlink’s latest offering is their Hybrid Express solution, which allows you to easily manage your internal vSphere infrastructure and your Amazon public IaaS cloud. This solution is designed to provide a seamless experience for administrators who need to move workloads between their on-premises infrastructure and the cloud.
However, it’s worth noting that Hotlink’s best selling offering is their multi-hypervisor management tool – Hotlink SuperVisor. This tool allows you to manage multiple hypervisors such as vSphere, Hyper-V, and Xen from a single interface. What I like about this concept is the idea that you could have hypervisor tiers of service, where perhaps your highest priority VMs are on vSphere and lower priority VMs are in Hyper-V. It’s all managed from vCenter, and VMs can easily be moved back and forth.
According to Lynn, by having these hypervisor tiers, Hotlink says that you can buy Hotlink SuperVISOR and still save your company a lot of money. This is because you can use the lower-cost Hyper-V or Xen hypervisors for non-critical workloads, while still using vSphere for your most important VMs. This approach could help organizations reduce their overall virtualization costs, while still maintaining a high level of performance and reliability.
I was also impressed with the product demo that Hotlink provided. They showed how easy it is to administer both your internal vSphere infrastructure and your Amazon public IaaS cloud using their Hybrid Express solution. The demo included showing how to move VMs back and forth between the two environments, as well as how to manage storage and networking across both environments.
One thing that caught my attention was the use of PowerCLI on Amazon EC2 at the end of the video. This is a very cool feature that allows you to automate tasks and manage your AWS environment using the same PowerCLI scripts that you use in your vSphere environment. This could be a game-changer for organizations that use both AWS and vSphere, as it allows them to leverage the power of PowerCLI across both environments.
In conclusion, Hotlink is a company that offers some innovative solutions for multi-hypervisor management and hybrid cloud management. Their Hybrid Express solution and Hotlink SuperVISOR tool offer a seamless experience for administrators who need to manage both their on-premises infrastructure and their Amazon public IaaS cloud. Additionally, the use of PowerCLI on Amazon EC2 is a very cool feature that could be a game-changer for organizations that use both AWS and vSphere. If you’re looking for a solution that can help you manage your virtualization infrastructure more efficiently and cost-effectively, Hotlink is definitely worth considering.