Some might say this was inevitable: the emergence of a super-hypervisor to incorporate all other hypervisors in a data center to coordinate modes of virtualization.
According to industry analysts that include Forrester, Gartner and IDC, it’s a fact that about two-thirds of large enterprise IT systems currently use two or more hypervisors — most often VMware ESX or vSphere and either Microsoft Hyper-V and/or Citrix XenServer. Thus, it’s possible for wires to get crossed and workloads to get tangled as virtualization complexity creeps in.
Appropriately, the new software comes from a startup, 18-month-old HotLink Corp., which emerged from stealth mode Aug. 9 to launch the HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware.
The company also announced it has secured $10 million in Series A financing, led by Foundation Capital with participation from Leapfrog Ventures.
HotLink claims this is the first software package to enable VMware vCenter users to deploy cross-platform infrastructure spanning Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (KVM).
“This is designed to enable interoperability of your hypervisors inside your existing management structure,” Lynn LeBlanc, CEO and founder of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based HotLink, told eWEEK.
“Unlike the more traditional overlaid solutions, such as (Microsoft’s) SystemCenter VMM support of VMware, that requires all of the native management capabilities of vCenter and then put the layer on top of it, we’re instead providing a bottoms-up approach to interoperability so that a vCenter user can use all the infrastructure in vCenter but also use it in conjunction with Hyper-V and KVM.”
LeBlanc, former founder and CEO of FastScale Technology — which was acquired by EMC in September 2009 — said HotLink is the only platform that can fully decouple management consoles from the underlying virtual infrastructure and enable native interoperability of hypervisors.
HotLink’s transformation engine 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 VMware infrastructure, LeBlanc said. No additional management console is required.
Hotlink was founded in early 2010 by data center software veterans and the founders of FastScale Technology. Early customers include enterprise IT organizations spanning technology, financial services, telecommunications and Internet search. HotLink’s advisory board includes executives from Informatica, McAfee, E*TRADE, eBay, Polycom, Citrix, BMC and Flextronics.