Dur­ing Tech Field Day #6 in Boston one par­tic­u­lar gen­eral fea­ture request has become increas­ingly prominent;

Can we have it inside the vCen­ter client?

In short, what we want is for all those great third party ven­dors like VKer­nel, Solar­winds and oth­ers to be able to put their fea­ture addons directly into the vCen­ter client. Cur­rently most third party apps “inte­grate” by offer­ing a new tab where you can access it, but I would love to see that being expanded even further.

As a con­crete exam­ple, I would love to see for instance VKer­nel iden­tify per­for­mance prob­lems for a VM and then tell me, inside the sum­mary tab for that VM that there is a prob­lem. Show it to me where I do my work, which is in vCen­ter, and mostly on the sum­mary screen. Dash­boards are great, but we’re all suf­fer­ing from dash­boardi­tis, and the more dis­parate dash­boards and tabs we get to have rela­tions with, the less we’re actu­ally able to use them properly.

Also, raise a vCen­ter alert to lever­age my exist­ing alert­ing scheme to get my atten­tion. If a 3rd party plu­gin sees that some­thing is wrong, tell me through the exist­ing infra­struc­ture I already have in place. No need to rein­vent the wheel each and every time, from each and every vendor.

Cou­ple that with my back-end user authen­ti­ca­tion (eg. Active Direc­tory) for sign-on into your solu­tion, and we’re get­ting much closer to the “sin­gle pane of glass” nir­vana sce­nario we’re all craving.

From what I gather the vCen­ter client (I am in no way, shape or form a devel­oper), doesn’t allow this level of inte­gra­tion on the VM sum­mary screen right now but VMware needs to make it pos­si­ble in the future.

We admins want this, and we need it, and frankly, I think we deserve it (and so does the 3rd party ven­dors con­tribut­ing to this ecosystem).

Update:

Read Multi-Hypervisor Man­age­ment and the Future for an updated and more for­ward think­ing post on the same sub­ject matter.

Written by . Christian is the owner of vNinja.net and a Senior Consultant for EVRY ASA, specializing in virtualization. Active twitter user and vSoup.net Virtualization Podcast co-host.