Virtualisation management specialist Vizioncore showed a beta version of its vRanger Pro 4 backup suite to attendees at the VMworld conference in Las Vegas today. The new software, which is due to be launched later this year, includes support for Microsoft’s PowerShell scripting language.

Herold: Excited about PowerShell extensibilty

Scott Herold, chief architect at Vizioncore, said, “We’re very excited about extensibility in vRanger Pro, we’re creating a PowerShell interface that will enable people to integrate vRanger Pro with their existing enterprise backup suites, such as Tivoli Storage Manager.” It will also enable tighter integration with the dedupe vendors, he added. The idea is that small and medium sized businesses would probably drive vCharter Pro from its graphical user interface, but larger customers would use their enterprise wide backup suite to manage backups of their virtual infrastructure using the PowerShell interface to vCharter Pro. “We want to complement and augment what the enterprise customers already have in place,” added Herold.

The move marks the beginning of a strategy to add PowerShell support to most of the Vizioncore product line. However, Herold said vRanger Pro would remain a thick dot-Net application rather than becoming a graphical front-end for generating PowerShell scripts. This is in contrast to many of Microsoft’s latest management tools, which don’t execute functions directly but actually produce PowerShell scripts that can then be scheduled or executed by the Windows PowerShell environment.

In separate news, Chris Akerberg, Vizioncore president and chief operating officer, said engineers would also blend the company’s vReplicator product into the forthcoming vCharter Pro release to give all the functionality in one interface.