Q&A with Lynn LeBlanc of HotLink
VSM: The company launched back in August. What have you been up to since then?
LL: Since our August launch, our first product, HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware, was released. This solution is a virtual integration and transformation platform that extends VMware vCenter to natively manage other hypervisors (including Hyper-V, XenServer and KVM) without adding another management console. In the fourth quarter, we launched a new version of the product and added new Enterprise customers like McAfee and BMC to our user base.
VSM: What new features does the new HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware 1.2 include?
LL: Enhanced Networking Configuration – Users can now provision and modify virtual switches and network adapters from VMware vCenter and associate these to any enterprise hypervisor so they can manage heterogeneous virtual networking from a single interface.
Expanded Performance Monitoring – We have expanded the heterogeneous performance statistics and alerts that are gathered and displayed inside the native VMware vCenter so administrators can quickly identify issues across their mixed hypervisor environment.
Robust Configuration of Virtual Machine Settings – Users can now modify the configuration of virtual machine settings, such as virtual CPUs and memory assignments, natively inside vCenter and apply across all virtual platforms, ensuring the optimum VM configuration regardless of the hypervisor.
VSM: How will customers benefit from this latest release?
LL: With the latest release of HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware, VMware vCenter users benefit from an enhanced virtual integration and transformation platform that provides total control and performance visibility across all enterprise hypervisors, using the vCenter management console they already have.
VSM: How do you differentiate yourself from the other virtualization management technologies on the market?
LL: HotLink is the only company to provide true hypervisor interoperability. Unlike overlay approaches that provide basic cross-platform automation on top of dual native management toolsets, the pioneering HotLink’s transformation technology abstracts the underlying hypervisors and workloads from the management layer to enable mixed virtual environments to be treated as unified and native objects inside the existing management infrastructure. We have incorporated this transformation technology into HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware to enable VMware vCenter users to deploy and manage cross-platform infrastructure spanning VMware vSphere, Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and Red Hat Enterprise Linux – natively. No additional management console is required.
VSM: You list McAfee and BMC Software as customers, how are these enterprises using HotLink SuperVISOR 1.2 in their data centers?
LL: McAfee historically was an all VMware shop. As business needs evolved, however, they developed requirements to manage a mix of vSphere, Hyper-V and XenServer. Utilizing the HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware platform, McAfee plans to increase usage of non-vSphere hypervisors while unifying management with VMware vCenter. Deploying a mix of hypervisors yet standardizing on VMware vCenter for management, they expect to reduce virtualization costs by over 50 percent and admin costs by 65 percent over the next 3 years.
