VMworld Buoyed by investor capital, VMware has struck out on the acquisition war path, taking Swiss virtualization company Dunes.

We can't claim any familiarity with Dunes' wares. Public information, however, characterizes the Dunes software as an abstraction layer for managing virtual machines. Apparently such software falls under the "orchestration manager" category these days and handles things such as "requisition and de-commissioning" – creation and deletion - of virtual machines. Don't the marketers move swiftly?

More specifically, Dunes Virtual Service-Orchestrator (VS-O) 3.1 software seems to handle pretty high-level health checks of VMs such as check pointing and version control. There's more on the software basics here.

Crucially, "VS-O is not a virtualization management tool itself, but an orchestration layer that abstracts multiple virtualization technologies from the business processes which rely on them".

Dunes must do something pretty darn special on the VM movement front because VMware has been beavering away at its own tools here for some time.

The Dunes code will plug right into VMware's existing code such as Lab Manager and Virtual Desktop Manager that performs similar tasks, according to the companies. The Lab Manager software was acquired last June through the purchase of Akimbi.

Financial terms for the Dunes deal were not revealed. ®