IT resource optimization company Gale Technologies announced a new product today, the Gale Scheduler for VMware Clouds.  Scheduler aims to further increase the cost efficiency of virtualization by optimizing the resource allocation to virtual machines.  This helps avoid VM sprawl, or the overuse of cloud infrastructure.

The offering does a lot of automation by provisioning and deprovisioning virtual machines based on policies set by the user; need, and availability.  Scheduler also ports workloads between VMs at the end of a reservation to prevent performance hiccups by long running machines.

“Gale Scheduler for VMware Clouds is the only product on the market today that provides time-based reservation, provisioning and capacity allocation for virtualized workloads, proactively arresting VM sprawl and assuring maximized infrastructure utilization,” says James Thomason, chief architect at Gale.

Another feature Gale Scheduler packs is the ability to import virtual machines with properties related to HA FT and DR created using vCenter, group them into workloads and optimize their resource consumption as well.  The software will be rolled out in mid November and will be priced at $100 per user per year.

One of the main reasons companies are virtualizing their infrastructure is to cut IT overhead costs, so Gale Scheduler for VMware Clouds should have a sizable market to tap.

Nautanix also had efficiency in mind when it announced its Complete Cluster last week.  It’s a cloud-in-a-box offering that doesn’t come with a particularly affordable price tag, but rather aims to slash costs by eliminating the need to integrate different solutions from different vendors in a datacenter.

Another company that put a big emphasis on VMware customers with its latest product is FalconStor. The cloud data protection firm launched version 7 of its software suite yesterday, which introduces VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager integration as well as vSphere support.