As vAdmins, we often find ourselves stuck in our own siloed environments, surrounded by the familiarity of our chosen hypervisor. However, this myopic view can blind us to the bigger picture and the potential benefits of a multi-hypervisor approach. At Tech Field Day #6 in Boston, Embotics presented a compelling case for a hypervisor-agnostic management strategy, highlighting the advantages of supporting multiple architectures in future versions. This shift in perspective has the potential to revolutionize the way we approach virtualization management.

Currently, 3rd party vendors must integrate their management tools into the individual hypervisors, creating a fragmented and complex environment for administrators. But what if the hypervisor vendors were to open up their management tools in a manner that allowed 3rd party vendors to integrate their data into a single, unified dashboard? This would provide a holistic view of the entire environment, allowing administrators to manage their workloads across multiple hypervisors from a single pane of glass.

Solarwinds Virtualization Manager offers an intriguing glimpse into what this type of integration could look like. The product provides statistics and status reports that can be easily integrated into other web pages, creating a customizable dashboard that displays information from multiple sources. Imagine 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, allowing administrators to create their own personalized dashboards that contain information from a wealth of sources.

Of course, there are challenges to overcome in achieving this type of integration. For example, what happens if you want to move something from Tier 2 to Tier 1, and the VMs run on different hypervisors? How do you enforce security between hypervisors with different management systems? These are not easy questions to answer, but they are important ones that must be addressed in order to create a truly multi-hypervisor environment.

Despite these challenges, the need for management tools to be hypervisor agnostic is very much present and will only continue to grow as more organizations adopt multi-hypervisor environments. As vAdmins, we must apply pressure on our hypervisor vendors to open up their management tools in a way that allows for this type of integration. The multi-hypervisor world is already here, and it’s time for us to embrace it.

In conclusion, the traditional approach of integrating 3rd party modules into the vCenter client may not be the most effective or efficient way forward. Instead, we should focus on creating a hypervisor-agnostic management strategy that allows administrators to manage their entire environment from a single dashboard. This shift in perspective has the potential to revolutionize the way we approach virtualization management and create a more streamlined and effective environment for our organizations.