Vizioncore Inc., the market leader in server virtualization management, today announced it is sponsoring the Virtualization EcoShell Initiative (VESI), a freeware development program that aims to enhance the virtualization administrative experience by extending automated virtualization management capabilities through a graphical scripting engine. VESI is based on Quest Software’s award winning PowerGUI and will build upon the momentum and market leadership generated by that project, combining the development skills and experience of the virtualization community to build a fully customizable graphical interface. The interface will provide management functionalities within a Windows PowerShell scripting environment tailored to the needs of virtualization experts and end-users alike.

Headed up by virtualization expert and author Scott Herold, VESI will enable any level of VMware administrator to take advantage of PowerShell’s capabilities provided by Microsoft and VMware through a consolidated graphical interface. Virtualization domain experts will be able to further make use of the flexibility provided by a powerful scripting engine and Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to customize automated administrative tasks specific to their organization’s needs. These capabilities will be enabled with a freeware software product called Virtualization EcoShell.

“VESI is about creating a free toolkit with which administrators can not only build their own powerful virtualization systems management interfaces, but benefit from the contributions of other VESI members as well,” commented Herold. “Quest has already proven the attraction of a community developed product with PowerGUI totaling over 200,000 downloads, and we can see Virtualization EcoShell following a similar path – promoting the development of automated systems and providing for free what many vendors still charge for.”

“We are excited about how the Virtualization EcoShell Initiative will help simplify the adoption of PowerShell management using the VMware Infrastructure Toolkit for Windows,” states Parag Patel, vice president, alliances, VMware. “We recognize that in the virtual world, automation is critical for improving manageability, minimizing complexity, and maximizing cost savings. VESI’s focus on community makes automation of VMware environments accessible to everyone, whether novice or expert, and does so in a way that is a lot more structured than just using a command prompt.”

“Vizioncore is strongly committed to supporting initiatives that can make the adoption of virtualization easier," said Chris Akerberg, president and chief operating officer at Vizioncore. "The Virtualization EcoShell Initiative is an empowering, grass-roots project that will equip users with needed tools, while inspiring and eliciting their best thinking about how to take virtualization to the masses. VESI provides a central place where knowledge and software innovations can be shared easily and freely. We see efforts like this one as a very positive development for the virtualization community at large.”

VESI will provide several key features and use cases out of the box, with the initial launch of the freeware product scheduled for the end of March, 2009. These features will allow organizations to get a strong sense for the customization capabilities that the product will provide for virtualization systems management.

Features:

• Customizable Administrative Console for simplified management of VMware Infrastructure and Windows workloads using PowerShell cmdlets from VMware and Microsoft
• Powerful Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for extending capabilities using PowerShell scripts
• Import and Export customization to easily exchange features with the VESI Community
• Optimization of administrative tasks by performing bulk tasks across any size VMware environment:
  • Configuration
  • Power
  • Inventory
• Creation of professional documentation of a VMware environment to view Host, VM, Storage, and Network configurations and easily identify potential configuration issues
• Tracking and reporting of changes to the VMware environment to assist in determining root cause analysis while troubleshooting the environment
• Creation and generation of custom reports on any aspect of the VMware environment or virtualized workloads
• Compatibility with existing PowerGUI PowerPacks to further extend virtualization capabilities to Active Directory, Exchange and Windows Management
• VESI is provided completely 100% free of charge!

The focal point for the initiative, TheVESI.org, is a community web site in which users of Virtualization EcoShell can quickly and easily seek customization assistance directly from the product’s developers as well as exchange ideas and extensions with other community members. TheVESI.org will be launched in February 2009, and Virtualization EcoShell will be made available as public beta towards the end of Q1 2009.