During a recent visit of HP Labs with a few colleagues, we were able to make a short tour of Cisco’s demo Center. I was able to attend a fairly impressive demonstration of VFrame 1.2, Cisco’s administration and orchestration umbrella for virtual environnements.
Cisco inherited VFrame with its TopSpin buyout and the software is now sold as a fully configured appliance. The least I can say is that the VFrame has significantly evolved since its Topspin era. It now allows automatic allocation of virtualised resources (servers, storage and network) from a single console. It integrates with VMware ESX Server and with Cisco’s administrations tools for storage and networking. Thanks to its rules engine, it can dynamically provision the resources required by an application chain to maintain its contractual SLA. The tool also greatly simplifies the provisionning of new virtual servers.
All these features come with a price that goes beyond the mere licensing of the tool. In its current version, VFrame is indeed heavily biased towards a Cisco/VMware infrastructure, even if the networking giant officially supports equipments form third parties.
