The VM Client is a management interface that VM operators can use to manage the life cycle of the virtual machines (VMs) in your enterprise, including creating, starting, stopping, migrating, and deleting VMs. PlateSpin Orchestrate lets you better align IT to your business, control costs, and minimize risks across all VM platforms in the data center. You can increase the functionality of your data center by fully leveraging VMs as a usable resource.
The VM Client provides management of VMs from several different virtualization host types, including SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) Xen, VMware (through vSphere), and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V.
The VM Client also allows you to manage both VMs and VM host servers in your data center. A VM host is a server running the Orchestrate Agent.
For information on installing the VM Client, see Installing the Orchestrate VM Client
in the PlateSpin Orchestrate 2.5 Installation and Configuration Guide.
The VM Client provides the following:
A VM creation wizard that covers a VM’s installation source and mode, its virtualization mode, repository, and hardware configurations
A VM editing wizard, which can also be used to edit existing VMs, even those that are in a running state
The ability to discover existing VMs residing on your VM host servers
The ability to discover VM host servers in your virtualization grid; a machine can be a host server if it is running hypervisor software
Methods for controlling VMs, such as starting, stopping, pausing, and suspending
The ability to migrate a running VM from one host server to another in real time
The ability to install and manage the PlateSpin Orchestrate Agent on your VMs
The ability to make templates of VMs, including making clones of the templates
The ability to move a VM’s repository from one host server to another
The ability to group VMs, VM hosts, repositories, and templates for easier management
Detailed views of the properties for each VM, host server, repository, and template
The ability to monitor your VMs and host servers in real time
Event logs for VMs, host servers, and templates
The VM Client enhances the functionality of the PlateSpin Orchestrate Server, enabling it to control VMs in your data center.
PlateSpin Orchestrate also provides the Development Client, where you can manage and control data center jobs and processes through the application of rules, policies, scheduling, utilization, and billing data center resources. For more information on the Development Client, see the PlateSpin Orchestrate 2.5 Development Client Reference.
The VM Client and the Development Client management interfaces work together to help you to maximize the use of VMs in your data center. You can have fewer physical machines while giving your data center many additional resources, and you can manage the physical VM host machines and their VMs in your data center.
The Orchestrate Server manages resources to perform work. It does this through automated jobs (written in Jython) that in turn are broken down into joblets that are distributed among multiple resources. For more information about PlateSpin Orchestrate and Orchestrate Server operations, see What You Should Know
in the PlateSpin Orchestrate 2.5 Developer Guide and Reference.
In addition, as calls for resources lessen and resources are released, the Orchestrate Server evaluates the capabilities of the active resources (VM or physical machine) and keeps the best resource for the job. This might include any of the currently running VMs.