Gale Technologies, a leading provider of infrastructure automation software solutions that power IT as a Service for labs, enterprises, and service providers, today announced Cloud Scheduler, a new tool for IT admins to ease VM reservation and scheduling in dynamic VMware environments. The Cloud Scheduler is a product built specifically for the purpose of maximizing the utilization of virtualized infrastructure, and automating repetitive tasks associated with provisioning VMs.
Virtualization results in significant savings through consolidation of infrastructure, but also creates new problems with virtual machine (VM) sprawl and over-allocation of resources that often erode the efficacy of virtualized infrastructure. In addition, IT administrators have to perform several manual operations each time a VM is requested, adding to delays and administrative overhead.
Cloud Scheduler addresses both these issues by automating administrative tasks associated with creating a VM, and proactively controlling VM sprawl by providing self-service scheduling and reservation of VMs for bounded periods of time. Cloud Scheduler automatically provisions and de-provisions virtual machines based on need, availability, and administrative policies, dramatically improving the utilization of the virtual infrastructure with intelligent and elegant capacity management. The self-service feature of Cloud Scheduler allows administrators of virtual infrastructure to automate repetitive manual steps to accelerate their responsiveness to VM requests from days to minutes.
With Cloud Scheduler organizations are able to fully realize the value of VMware virtualization with these benefits:
- Improving Agility of VM delivery by automating manual tasks associated with provisioning a VM and offering a self-service catalog of VMs for users to reserve;
- Arresting VM Sprawl with need-based allocation of resources to VMs;
- Increasing infrastructure utilization with intelligent allocation and de-allocation of virtual resources;
- Pro-actively managing capacity based on actual anticipated demand; and,
- Preventing performance issues caused by long running VMs by decommissioning virtual resources at the end of the reservation.
Because of Cloud Scheduler’s integration with VMware vSphere APIs, customers who have deployed VMware vSphere can seamlessly manage virtual inventory as well as import virtual machines with properties related to HA FT and DR that were created using the vSphere client. These imported VMs can be grouped into workloads and scheduled through the Cloud Scheduler. The Cloud Scheduler can scale to a large infrastructure managed by one or more VMware vCenter servers.
"With Cloud Scheduler, we want to enable businesses to create self-service infrastructures, while still maintaining the controls that prevent waste and misuse of expensive resources," said James Thomason, chief technology officer at Gale Technologies. "Cloud Scheduler is the only product on the market today that provides time-based reservation, provisioning and capacity allocation for virtualized workloads, proactively arresting VM sprawl and assuring maximized infrastructure utilization."
Product Availability and Pricing
The product will be available for download on November 30th from www.galetechnologies.com. The first 10 licenses are free. Additional licenses will be $100/user/year.