No question that increasing competition in the virtual platform space will not only bring hypervisor costs down, it will require performance management vendors to provide solutions that support all the leading platforms. Most likely, any given customer will have (at minimum) a mix of VMware and Microsoft hypervisors deployed. That is precisely why my company, Integrien, supports the hypervisors of many of the leading vendors including VMware, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft and more.

Besides the fact that performance management vendors will need to develop solutions to get accurate metric data on virtual machines for different vendor's hypervisors, they'll also need a way to handle the increased complexity that is a byproduct of virtualization. Customers will not risk losing the costs savings attained by server consolidation to increzsed management costs.

Virtualization means additional components to manage. You need to understand the behavior of the Host O/S and the hypervisor in addition to the guest O/S and applications running in the VMs (that used to reside on physical servers). By definition, you’ll have to manage more metrics and associated alerts (probably on the order of 20% more). If you want to preserve the ROI of virtualization, current monitoring and management stratgeies simply won't scale. A new approach is necessary that automates much of the manual effort of troubleshooting complex applications with virtualized components. There are now solutions available that use real time analytics to automate this massive manual effort and can support the full lifecycle of your virtualization rollout from initial candidate selection to ongoing management. While none of the Big 4 vendors offer these capabilities currently, they would be wise to bring them to market quickly. Their customers are going to need them.

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