Last week, in talking about Quest Technology’s acquisition of ScriptLogic, I mentioned in passing that Quest had acquired Aelita Software three years ago. Now, I can tell you that the same folks who powered Aelita have launched an organization, in a new hot area of server management.

Veeam Software introduced Version 1.0 of Veeam Configurator last week. It’s a Windows GUI interface and set of expert knowledge packs designed to automate - and hopefully streamline - virtual server configurations. The initial release integrates with and extends the capabilities of VMware VirtualCenter but the company has promised that the Microsoft Virtual Server – and maybe even Linux’ XEN virtualization technology – will be covered soon.

All of the major players at Veeam - President and CEO Ratmir Timashev, CTO Andrei Baronov, and R&D Director Alexey Vasilyev – are the same people who drove Aelita to the top of the heap in Windows Server migration and management. In a newsletter back in 2003, when I first covered Aelita, I described the folks as people who really liked the promise of Windows NT as a network operating system but disliked the available tools, utilities and management services for the NOS. So they decided to build their own. By the time Windows 2000 was launched, they were able to put together Aelita’s Controlled Migration Suite, a boon to overworked network managers everywhere.

With their new company, the software troika aims to lighten the burden on network managers once again. The heart of Veeam Configurator 1.0 is the five built-in “Experts” that embody essential Veeam expertise in a virtual server configuration. These pre-written modules automate key functions such as enabling or disabling root access, ensuring accurate time synchronization, reporting on the current patch level for the VMWare ESX Servers, and more. They promise that additional Experts will be created based on customer feedback and suggestions.

Configurator is just the latest tool in the Virtual Server toolbox from Veeam, joining FastSCP, a fast, secure and easy-to-use tool to perform file management in ESX environment; Reporter, which automatically discovers and collects information about VMware Infrastructure 3 environments; Monitor, which facilitates deployment planning and performance troubleshooting of virtual machines on a Windows-based VMware Server; and RootAccess, a wizard that helps you to enable or disable remote root access to ESX servers.