DynamicOps homes in on VM provisioning

DynamicOps describes its Virtual Resource Management (VRM) tool as a "unified approach to managing both server and desktop virtualization" regardless of the hypervisor platform.

But we found that VRM is more of a provisioning tool for deploying and controlling access to virtual machines, and is less effective when it comes to the subsequent management of the successfully installed VMs. (See screenshot.)

Also, not all hypervisors are equal in terms of VRM's ability to control and manipulate VMs running on top of them. VMware-based VMs are definitely more malleable under VRM's control than instances running atop Hyper-V and XenServer.
Generally, there were more manual steps to use the DynamicOps tools to control non VMware-grounded VMs.

DynamicOps VRM (we mainly tested Version 3.1.0 except for when the company supplied 3.1.1 to address issues we had with Windows 2008 Server support of Windows Imaging Format [WIM] imaging needed to support Hyper-V) must be installed on a 32-bit version of Windows Server 2003 R2. We were able to install it inside an appropriate Windows 2003R2 virtual machine without issue. The program needs access to at least two CPUs, 2GB of RAM and 40GB of disk space.

It also needs a database. We tested it with SQL Server Express 2005, but it also works with SQL Server 2005. Microsoft .Net 3.5 and Microsoft IIS 6.0 with ASP.NET are also required.

The supported virtual environments are XenServer 5 or later, VMware ESX 2.5 or later with VirtualCenter 2 or later included and Hyper-V 1.0. It was necessary to install proxy agents for each kind of virtual environment that we had deployed in the test bed.

Starting up

The default installation was not complicated. Configuring the product did require a careful reading of the manual. But the upgrade to Version 3.1.1 was an error-ridden process. For example, some user-based data did not correctly transfer during the upgrade. We had to add those manually to the database. A DynamicOps spokesperson said these database problems we incurred ought to be fixed by the time you read this.

In our initial test with VMware ESX, we had to enter information for many different configuration settings such as blueprints, provisioning groups, cost profiles and VM machine name prefixes before we were able to add our VirtualCenter information and import our guests into the VRM console. Then, we were able to start and stop the machines that were imported by using the VRM Infrastructure Organizer tool

When we tested VRM with XenServer, we had to add XenServer information manually, first adding the host in the hosts category, then creating a reservation to make sure there is enough storage and CPU, then assigning the reservation to the host. After that, we could finally add a VM by entering in the details about each VM.

This process could become very tedious if you had many Xen-based VMs. A rudimentary discovery process in the application would grease this application mightily. DynamicOps representatives said the Infrastructure Organizer should be able to handle XenServer and Hyper-V environments in the next major release (3.2) of VRM.