Vangaea provides an open, RESTful interface and single sign-on access for communicating with several leading hypervisors such as VMware Infrastructure 3.5, VMware vSphere 4.0, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer 5.5.
Vangaea is a RESTful server application that handles incoming HTTP requests and retrieves data from hypervisors on behalf of the authenticated user.
Other hypervisor APIs are either SOAP-based web services or a proprietary, closed binary communications layer. The advantages of an open API are obvious, but what are the advantages of REST? Simply put, a RESTful virtualization API opens up virtualization development to weekend computer programming languages. Recently a brief study was posted to Slashdot.org where it was discovered that C# and Java are popular work-day programming languages, but the languages of choice on the weekend were Ruby, PHP, etc. In other words, the languages that the web-based platforms of tomorrow are being built on. And yet virtualization still must be managed by heavy and complicated APIs?
Vangaea finally makes it possible to manage virtualization, the sexiest technology in IT with the languages that the Internets 2.0 and 3.0 are being built upon. More information on the how Vangaea uses REST can be found on the RESTful page.
Vangaea is not only completely open source (BSD License), but all of the components it relies on from Hyper9 (UVAPI, JWbem, Hyper9-Common) are open source as well.
Vangaea also provides a single sign-on architecture for working with multiple hypervisors. It does this by storing encrypted versions of your hypervisor credentials in its database. More information on how single sign-on works and its security features can be found on the single sign-on page.