Microsoft announced on Friday that it has purchased Opalis, the only remaining independent run-book automation vendor with a large customer base and good track record. This finally puts to rest rumours that Opalis may be acquired by IBM for their Tivoli suite or by CA.

Both BMC and HP have had run-book automation in their portfolio for some years following their respective acquisitions of RealOps (now Atrium Orchestrator) and iConclude (now HP Operations Orchestrator).

Though Microsoft System Center suite has increasingly gone head to head with BMC's BladeLogic and HP's BTO (which includes the Opsware suite) on a number of deals, this acquisition means Microsoft will soon be selling an end to end process automation solution for the first time.

According to the Technet article, Opalis will become part of Microsoft's System Center suite of products.

No financial details were released but unconfirmed rumour has it the deal was done for around $60m.

Virtualisation is clearly a break from the past, and it is here to stay. But alongside its indisputable benefits, an old infrastructure problem has re-surfaced with a vengeance: sprawl.

Jython is a Java implementation of Python. It is shipped as a Java class file which may be downloaded from the homepage here: http://www.jython.org/Project/.

BLJython is Jython with a few additional libraries which exposes parts of the BladeLogic programmatic API. As of 7.4.2, only Jython 2.2 is currently supported - newer versions will not work as the libraries are incompatible.

Integrating BladeLogic with Active Directory provides a single-sign-on solution which allows users to access the BladeLogic client interface without re-entering their username and password. As the Reports server is a web interface, users will still have to supply their credentials manually, but the username/password will be authenticated using Active Directory.

BladeLogic uses Sun's JGSS libraries to authenticate with Kerberos. When debugging an issue encountered integrating BladeLogic and Active Directory, you may find Sun's JGSS mailing lists useful.