Vendors prep management tools to handle virtualization

Computer Associates and BMC Software will soon join IBM in upgrading their management packages to help customers get a handle on their growing virtualized environments, making it easier to shift server workloads to meet business demands.

At its user conference in November, CA is expected to detail a tighter partnership with server virtualization specialist VMware to let users shift workloads across VMware virtual servers. BMC is expected to use the VMworld conference in October to debut software that will let users monitor a shared pool of virtual resources and deliver capacity in real-time fashion. The vendor declined to comment further on product details. IBM, meanwhile, put its focus on server virtualization last week, announcing updates to its Tivoli management products to let end users schedule batch jobs on virtual resources based on resource availability.

In addition, a range of vendors, including Microsoft, Platform Computing, SWsoft, Virtual Iron and VMware have made announcements in the past few weeks related to more-advanced tools for virtualized server management.

Server virtualization is nothing new; it has been available on mainframes and Unix servers for years. But it's relatively recent that end users have been able to divvy up single standards-based systems into virtual partitions. With that technology becoming mainstream - Intel and Advanced Micro Devices plan to embed virtualization capabilities into their silicon next year, and Xen now offers an open source virtualization technology - the focus now is more about how to manage those virtualized resources.

The user view

In addition to seeing management products from VMware, users expect to see tighter integration between the virtualization software vendors and systems management firms such as IBM and Computer Associates.

"We believe that there will evolve a data center operating system," says Ron Rose, CIO at Priceline.com in Norwalk, Conn. "Inevitably you will see unifying work from a variety of companies. This is already present in provisioning tools from Bladelogic and Opsware. Virtual Iron, Xensource and VMware are trying to address the distribution of a unit of work. Our belief is that over time, all of these characteristics get unified into an overall system similar in characteristics to the great operating systems of the mainframe era . . . but applied across all these individual boxes in the data center rather than one individual machine."

"It's all part of a larger move toward something that we've been describing as data center automation, where you're understanding all your resources across the data center whether physical or virtual, and enabling the ability to share resources and then manage them according to some sort of prioritization," says Frank Gillett, principal analyst at Forrester Research. "The end goal is to get to the point where you can manage for business outcomes, rather than simply saying, 'OK, that server gets this much capacity.'"

"Capabilities like VMotion [which lets users move live virtual machines among physical servers] and VMware's upcoming distributed resource scheduler allow you to automatically and dynamically balance workloads between physical machines transparently," he says. "It really makes you look at virtualization not just for the hard dollar savings but also for the softer day-to-day operational savings that you don't have with your typical physical machines."