virtualization.info

Earlier this week, CA announced its support for Oracle/Sun Solaris Containers (aka Zones) OS virtualization technology in a number of products:

• Spectrum Infrastructure Manager
• eHealth Performance Manager
• Spectrum Service Assurance
• Spectrum Automation Manager

CA calls then its virtualization management platform but the technologies above primarily support physical servers and over time added support for VMware ESX and now Solaris Containers.

Sun announced its OS virtualization technology a the beginning of 2004, releasing Containers as part of Solaris 10 in February 2005.
CA decides to support it only five years later, now that Oracle acquired Sun and announced its commitment on Solaris.
Other companies may see a new opportunity here and follow CA.

Another interesting thing is that CA decided to give priority to Solaris Containers rather than Microsoft Hyper-V or Citrix XenServer.

Labels: CA, Oracle, Sun

So far the CA activity in the virtualization space has been more than silent.
Yes, the company issued many press announcements stating that it’s reworking many of its products to support virtualization, but the software giant never took major steps to become a virtualization leader like almost every other major IT player did in the last two years.

Hiring the former co-founder of Virtugo (a virtualization startup that mysteriously disappeared shortly after its merge with uXcomm), Chris Dickson, as Vice President didn’t seem to help much.

Now things may change as CA just made a joint announcement with VMware, revealing that its Data Center Automation Manager is integrated with VMware vCenter and will interoperate with Stage Manager.
Additionally, VMware vCenter capabilities are integrated into the CA Advanced Systems Management (ASM), where the VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) technology can merge with the CA’s Dynamic Resource Brokering (DRB), and together they can possibly start a fantastic virtualization management sprawl.

The announcement seems to imply that these are just the first steps of a much more tighten relationship. We’ll see for how long CA will be happy to play this role in the virtualization industry.

Labels: Alliances, CA, VMware