Visioncore just announced their Virtualization EcoShell Initiative at VMworld Europe 2009.  The first public beta is expected to be released at the end of next month.  It looks like it is a community aimed at helping virtualization professionals use PowerShell scripts to manage their VI.

The initiative is dubbed VESI(TM) and the Virtualization EcoShell product is based on the popular PowerGUI.  I have a little experience with Powershell and really like its power, extensibility, and uniform syntax.  PowerGUI provides a nice UI for it. 

I have been expecting Visioncore to leverage PowerGUI, which was developed by their parent company, Quest Software.  Managing VI with PowerShell makes so much sense.   One advantage of PowerShell is that many virtualization professionals wear a number of hats, including Windows Administrator.  PowerShell is compatible with many (most??) Microsoft enterprise products and with VMware so VI professionals can learn a single scripting language and use it many places.  Although to be fair, other scripting languages are popular, too.  Perl comes to mind, and a number of Perl scripts are available from the VMprofessional web site.  However, Microsoft hasn’t and won’t adopt Perl.

I have spoken with a number of virtualization professionals, and the trend is definitely towards scripted automation.  The term “automation” brings speed and lower costs to mind, and speed and reduced costs are certainly beneficial.  However, another key benefit is repeatability.  The easiest way to make sure VI is configured correctly is to use scripts that can be debugged once and used many times.  I think repeatability is perhaps the most important benefit. 

VESI will certainly accelerate the automation trend.  It all makes sense to me, except for one thing.  Why does VESI include a tortoise in their logo?  When I see a tortoise I think of “slow”.   In fact, one of the dictionary definitions for tortoise is “a very slow person or thing”.  (I know.  EcoShell and tortoise shell.  It still means slow to me.)

powershell, virtualization

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 at 3:02 am and is filed under Virtual Product Management, Virtual Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.