HotLink announced version 1.2 of its SuperVISOR software, a solution that enables customers to use VMware vCenter in order to manage cross-platform virtualized environments. It supports Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The latest release features three notable enhancements. SuperVISOR has been extended to the networking layer for one thing; allowing users to provision and modify virtual switches and network adapters from vCenter, even if they’re connected with a competitor’s hypervisor. In addition, more performance statistics can now be viewed within the vCenter performance tab, and resource provisioning has been improved.

“Robust Configuration of Virtual Machine Settings – Only HotLink provides the ability to modify the configuration of virtual machine settings such as virtual CPUs and memory assignments natively inside vCenter and apply across all virtual platforms —ensuring the optimum VM configuration regardless of the hypervisor.”

SuperVISOR gives customers a very attractive opportunity to couple VMware’s leading software with its less popular competitors’ offerings. And while they’re still lagging behind alternative hypervisors are seeing a lot of adoption: Citrix grew 25 percent last year; Hyper-V grew by 62 percent during the same period.

It’s interesting that VMware has come up with quite a few new ways of tapping its competitors’ customers – Microsoft’s in particular. Tier 3’s release of Iron Foundry introduced .NET support to Cloud Foundry, VMware’s open-source PaaS. The code includes a couple of other things as well, but this new means of grabbing Azure users from Microsoft stands out the most.

EMC’s virtualization unit is expanding in a number of markets at the same time. Among them is the social enterprise space, where, according to some recent executive speeches, it has a rather consolidated vision about how it intends to combine its different technologies for the customer’s benefit.