VMware has added the ability to manage non-vSphere hypervisors to vCenter with the release of vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager 1.0.

At the moment, the only non-VMware hypervisor it supports is Microsoft’s Hyper-V (although in both the 2008 and 2008 R2 flavors), so the Multi-Hypervisor name seems ambitious.  I say we should keep in mind that this is a 1.0 release and interpret the choice of name as a sign of things we should look for in future releases.

Features include:

• Management of non-ESXi hosts
• Ability to provision VMs on non-ESXi hosts
• Ability to edit VM settings
• Ability to install guest OSes on VMs
• Integrated vCenter Server authorization mechanism across ESXi and non-ESXi hosts
• Automatic discovery of pre-existing non-vSphere virtual machines

vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager 1.o is supported with vCenter Server 5.1 and vCenter Client 5.1.  It is not available in vSphere web client.

You can get the full details in the release notes.

I’m looking forward to getting the chance to take this out for a test drive.