Repton today announced the general availability of  V-Ployment – an innovative software product that dramatically cuts the build and configuration time traditionally needed for VMware ESX servers. Using the tool companies can expect implementation speeds x25 faster than the manual redeployment of ESX builds. 

Distinct in the marketplace, and developed as a direct response to customer demand, V-Ployment is the only product currently available to offer more than a basic initial (pre) build template. Competitive products still require companies to develop the actual ESX build – a highly complex task requiring medium to high technical skills in both ESX and Linux, and necessitating significant time and cost commitments. 

Steve Atkinson, Repton Virtualisation Architect explained: “Currently companies with multiple VMware ESX servers are struggling with manual ESX builds due to limited skilled in-house resources. This leads to inconsistent and mis-configured builds, slow, repetitive and resource intensive projects, and future support issues.

V-Ployment draws on more than five years’ best practice experience as the sole awarded VMware reseller in Northern Europe, and offers companies an easy-to-use tool for rapid, simple, consistent ESX server configuration and deployment.” 

Not only does V-Ployment save companies time during the initial deployment, but it also drastically cuts down effort, time and cost when re-provisioning or building additional servers in the future - a significant ongoing benefit to time-pressed companies with non-Unix skilled support staff. Testament to its simplicity, V-Ployment has enabled Repton themselves to reduce its own standard ESX build guide by 30 pages - from 35 to just 5 pages.

Once the first server has been properly configured the line is simply duplicated for each host within a formatted CSV file. As there are only three unique fields that change for each server within a cluster companies are able rapidly to configure single or multiple build (iso) files - actual operator effort to mount and start the build is estimated at just five minutes per server.

Additional benefits include ‘out the box’ automated patch management, ensuring any new or re-built ESX hosts are always patched and up-to-date, and the ability to store entire host configurations for Disaster Recovery and back up purposes.

Atkinson explained: “In the event of a critical ESX server failure or problem it is easy to fix hardware issues and re-provision the host from the V-Ployment image file. Using the tool, operator effort now takes less than ten minutes.”

Users concerned about VMware’s recent announcement about ESX 3i and how this may affect this new application, can rest assured that V-Ployment offers an unparalleled, easy-to-use advanced deployment solution to customers deploying ESX VI3 now.  V-Ployment will continue to be developed to add supplementary functionality and benefits for all future ESX VI3/3i versions.

Additional information is available at: www.repton.co.uk/virtualisation or by contacting Alistair Wybrew on 0208 894 9000 or e-mail: alistair.wybrew@repton.co.uk

You can download an evaluation of their product, here.