VM-Aware

Everybody is well aware that PlateSpin makes some great products (PowerRecon, PowerConvert), but it sometimes seems difficult to justify the costs against free VMware alternatives (Capacity Planner, VMware Converter).

However, all it takes is a 15 minute demonstration of their products and it becomes immediately obvious why the money should be spent.

PowerRecon not only looks better and is significantly more intuitive, it has a plethora of in-built reports that takes the sting out of creating a capacity planning related document. It will email notifications to administrators if data collection stops working on particular machine(s) so that at no point will lots of data be lost. It works with practically all the Operating Systems that you could wish for, but most importantly it works with all the supported Operating Systems under VMware ESX Server. It also hosts all the data collected within a Postgre or SQL server database that is hosted on-site at the customer, another very compelling reason to use it.

Having spoken to a few of their engineers, they all relate that they can complete a full document in under 1/2 a day. This, I’m sure anybody that uses Capacity Planner will agree, is a significant improvement in itself.

There is also seamless integration into PowerConvert, which unlike VMware converter can fully customise the resultant Virtual Machine, before it is created. Features include SID regeneration, service customisation, disaster recovery option.

Again another demonstration of this product is essential to see why it is worth selling as a service over VMware Converter.

Bookmarks

Tags: PlateSpin

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 13th, 2007 at 4:55 pm and is filed under Backups, VMworld, Virtualisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.