Let’s take this opportunity to highlight two new import features in Skytap EaaS that will likely make a huge impact on the productivity and time-to-value for every Skytap customer. Now you can directly import multiple VMs, or a complete virtual application stack directly into Skytap environments, and have Skytap automatically handle the configuration and setup tasks.
Why is this huge? Rather than importing VMs one at a time, or importing them into “templates” that you later configure and convert into environments, our customers can just sit back and let Skytap automate the whole dang process for them.
Check out this little :60 second highlight reel showing the process of exporting a vApp from VMware vCenter and importing it exactly as configured into Skytap:
Insanely easy and fast. One note: I did speed up the “time lapse” part where the files are uploading over the Internet… your network speeds may vary.
While the single VM import process was not identified as a huge problem by our customers when compared to the additional days or weeks of work required to maintain environments in on-premises or raw cloud infrastructure, everyone likes eliminating tedious tasks and opportunities for human error. It was still enough of a startup task that many customers preferred to send in a hard drive of VMs and have Skytap Customer Support do the import and configuration. (We can still do that for customers that want it, of course, or support you online with this new process…)
Now the process is so easy, you can set it and forget it, even if you are importing multiple heterogeneous types of VMs (ESX, Xen, Hyper-V, etc.) into multiple application environments in one session. They will appear within running environments in Skytap as soon as they are ready, and you can start using and stamping out copies of them at will. The whole process can be queued up with a few clicks in the UI, no need to write a bunch of code to batch these projects.
The new Skytap Environment Import features include:
- An intuitive UI for setting up the import of any combination of configured vApp environments or individual VMs directly into Skytap environments, instead of items in a template library for later configuration
- Batch queuing of multiple imports from multiple sources, so an extended import session can be treated as a single automated job without further human intervention
- The ability to handle very heterogenous imports and automatically image them in Skytap on the appropriate nested hypervisors and OS configurations
- Automatic reassembly of fully configured environments as specified in the source vApps, including network and IP settings, load balancers, security, etc.
We don’t know of another solution on the market making the barrier to entry for establishing environments this low for developers and IT Ops teams. Our goal is to continue doing whatever it takes to make it even easier to get started with Environments-as-a-Service for development, testing, training and software demo customers.
• Read all about how to import VMs and vApps in the Skytap help and documentation site.
