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Based on a recommendation from a coworker, I decided to check out a product called Akimbi Slingshot this weekend. Slingshot is touted as a “Virtual Lab Automation System” – which means that it can be used to quickly provision, manage, store and collaborate on virtual machines running on some of the major virtualization platforms today – VMware GSX and Microsoft Virtual Server.

Essentially, Slingshot sits above the management interfaces of the virtualization software and allows you to centrally create, configure and provision virtual machines across an entire “farm” of GSX and Virtual Server hosts. It also allows you to group these virtual machines (templates, as they are known in the product) into “configurations”. This piece of functionality would come in quite handy for a test and development environment. You could have a standard configuration of a Windows Server Domain Controller, Exchange Server, SQL Server and WinXP workstation running within VMs in seconds. And the software allows you to clone and create point-in-time snapshots of virtual machines so that you can quickly duplicate your configuration and then share it with someone else. Other handy features like a “Media Library” which organizes ISO images for software installation and the “Akimbi Tools” which automatically configures the IP Address, MAC Address and SID of machines to avoid conflicts are also pretty neat.

I spent some time with the product this afternoon using the company’s 30-day trial and an installation of VMware GSX server. I must say I was pretty impressed – though I am sure I wasn’t able to properly put the thing through its paces with my single-server environment. The installation was pretty straightforward and the online documentation was informative. I did run into a small issue, though, which prevented me from “deploying” (more Slingshot terminology) a template once I had created it. I sent off a quick email to their support alias and received a response (and a fix) in less than an hour. On a Saturday afternoon, no less. And for software that I was just evaluating. I appreciate software companies that still try hard to exceed their clients’ or prospects’ expectations. You don’t see that very often these days.

The product supports every sort of guest operating system you could imagine and provides the ability to import existing virtual machines you may have through it’s import functionality. It also has Platespin’s P2V capabilities built into the product allowing you to create Slingshot templates from physical servers. Overall, I think companies looking to simplify the provisioning and management of their virtual machines should check this out. The ability to centrally store virtual machines and “spin them up” on any number of servers based on usage and other policies is worth the price of admission. Some of the complex configuration support and virtual machine sharing functionality is also pretty useful if you do a lot of testing and development and leverage virtualization technology in those endeavors.

Here’s some more information on the Slingshot product if your interested in taking a look.