With the first post in a new corporate blog, VMware unveiled the existence of Code Central, an online facility where its community can upload and exchange scripts for the various VMware SDKs.
VMware has a special interest in seeing what kind of automation the virtualization professionals want to have now that its vCenter Orchestrator has been released as a free module of vSphere 4.0.
Orchestrator is powered by the technology that VMware acquired by Dunes Technologies in September 2007.
The Dunes framework is powerful and flexible enough to become the foundation for new products, from a VDI connection broker to a virtual lab automation manager.
In most cases the customers will use it to automate specific aspects of their environments, but once in a while a Code Central public script become popular enough to give the input to VMware for a new, non-free product.
This is the same strategy that is being pursued by Vizioncore, which recently launched a free scripting IDE for PowerShell called Virtualization EcoShell, an extension of the PowerGUI console that its parent company Quest releases for free a long time ago.
Also in this case, Quest/Vizioncore is giving away the tools for free to grow a loyal developers community and see if any member can produce something amazing to extend their new automation product called vControl.