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As many people have hopefully noticed, yesterday marked the release of Virtualization EcoShell from Vizioncore. Virtualization EcoShell is a freeware desktop toolkit for VMware administrators based off Windows PowerShell technology. When get out to customer sites or am at trade shows I am often asked “Where did this idea come from?â€, or “Wow, what into getting this available?â€Â For this blog series, I figured I’d give everyone some insight into what went into taking Virtualization EcoShell from conception to delivery. The trick will be doing so in a way that doesn’t put everyone to sleep. I’ve decided to split this post into two parts that I will release over two days. In exchange for making you guys come back both days, I’ll post another chapter a week early right after I post Part 2 tomorrow.
 The Idea
The idea behind Virtualization EcoShell is something that had been with me for a VERY long time. When I was in consulting and just starting out with VMware I always had my "Personal Toolbox" which contained several utilities. Some of those were free, some I had to pay for. For every customer I went to, I would happily repurchase these tools because how much easier it was for me to deliver a proper solution to my customer. About 4-5 customers in, I vowed that one day I would make a free toolkit that accommodates everyone’s needs. For the first year or two that I was in the software business with Vizioncore I completely forgot about my oath to build my toolkit and instead focused on helping enterprises by tailoring virtualization solutions around their core challenges. About 12-15 months ago, shortly after coming off a very successful project of tailoring Quest’s Foglight product to a virtualization specific market (now a product called vFoglight for Vizioncore), I began talking to customers about some of their pain points in virtualization management. There were a lot of solutions available in the market, but still the challenge of them not being 100% what was needed existed, thus forcing our customers to look for different tools to “fill the gapsâ€. It was at this time that I got bit by the toolkit bug again. I wanted to find a way to build a toolkit that all VMware admins could benefit from, but at the same time, make it extensible so any “gaps†could easily be filled. The tricky part about the whole thing was in the fact that I wanted to provide this desktop toolkit for free. This idea was different than anything Vizioncore had done before, but fortunately it was not Quest’s first time. Quest Software has a long history of successful tools that fall under what I call the “Personal Productivity†category, the most successful being Toad. Make sure you come back for Part 2, in which I discuss how I was able to get started and leverage existing Quest intellectual property to make my muttered statements from 6 years ago finally come true.
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