Cassatt extends orchestration to include Parallels Virtuozzo Containers
The good folks at Cassatt are at it again. This time they've extended the capabilities of their Active Response by allowing it to orchestrate workloads hosted in a Parallels Virtuozzo Container as well as those hosted within a virtual machine. Since some workloads are better and more effiently hosted using operating system virtualization/partitioning technology rather than as a virtual machine, Cassatt's launch of Active Response 5.3 allows organizations a greater amount of choice.
Here's how Cassatt describes Active Response 5.3
Cassatt Corporation broadened its support for virtualization technologies to include Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, now generally available as part of the new 5.3 version of Cassatt Active Response. Enterprise customers can now more easily deliver internal cloud computing using the heterogeneous virtual and physical IT resources that they already have inside their data centers. The update also adds smarter policy control in failure scenarios for physical servers.
While cloud computing offers great promise in IT utilization and efficiency, many companies will not entrust their enterprise applications to external service providers. Cassatt Active Response provides customers with the automation and control software needed to implement cloud-style computing environments using the systems that already exist inside their own firewalls. Cassatt delivers the same operational efficiency, fault tolerance, and energy savings promised by external clouds, but without the worries over security, compliance, lack of control, or the costs or delays required to change or replace their current applications.
Cassatt previously supported management and control of virtualization technology from VMware and Citrix, and is targeting support for Microsoft Hyper-V next. With the addition of support for Parallels Virtuozzo Containers OS-level virtualization solutions, Cassatt Active Response can help improve data center management for hosting providers and other enterprises taking advantage of Parallels’ technology.
In addition, the new Parallels Virtuozzo Containers support provides an automation and control solution for data centers with multiple virtualization technologies. According to data from Cassatt’s forthcoming second annual data center trends survey, over two-thirds of IT organizations either already have more than one virtualization technology deployed or expect that to be the case over time.
Snapshot analysis
I've often mentioned that virtualization is far more than merely virtual machine technology. In fact, virtual machine technology is just one of five different types of virtual processing technology. Virtual processing technology, in turn, is just one of a number of layers of different types of virtualization technology (see Sorting out the different layers of virtualization for more information on the Kusnetzky Group Model. Virtual machine technology is not always the best virtualization tool to select. In the post "When is virtual machine technology the wrong choice?" I reviewed some typical requirements and the best option to choose.Cassatt's Active Response has been on my radar screen for quite some time and would be a useful tool in many organization's portfolio of tools. One of the challenges the product faced in the past was that it didn't include a way to monitor and orchestrate workloads deployed using other forms of virtualization technology. Supporting Parallels Virtuozzo is a good move. It is, however, only the first step.
As I've often pointed out, enterprise datacenters are complex environments having an amazing collection of systems that include mainframes, midrange systems and industry standard systems. Technology that only supports one of these platforms clearly just adds to the burden organizations are facing. Simply uprooting and replacing these established citizens of the datacenter isn't really the right answer here and now. Integration is a better answer.