As the reality of virtualization sets in at more enterprise IT shops, more management vendors are incorporating the capabilities to control the virtual environments with their monitoring tools.

Virtualization, which industry watchers say will move further into production nets this year, is a means of abstracting software from its physical counterpart to create a more flexible and dynamic data center. The technology lets IT managers, for instance, create multiple virtual server instances in one physical machine, maximizing space, computing power and resources, advocates say. A 2006 Forrester Research survey showed of some 1,770 companies polled, more then 50% had put the technology to use in production and pilot networks.

"Server virtualization moved from a niche Unix technology to mainstream use in x86 servers in many firms in 2005," reads the report released early this year.

Such facts and figures are exactly what management vendors need to hear to get their products up to speed in monitoring and managing the more fluid environments created with virtualization technology from the likes of VMware. Management veterans such as BMC, CA, HP and IBM put support for virtual environments in their tools and newer players like Hyperic, Opsware and Netuitive. And the vendors are doing this not a moment too soon as the dynamic environments require more careful, complex management skills.

Now service-level management software maker Nimsoft enabled its NimBUS product to also take on the virtual realm.

NimBUS for VMware, which is priced at $750 per probe per virtual machine, can be downloaded from the Internet and installed within hours, the company says. The add-on software works with the company's flagship product, which installs on a dedicated server, and depending on the customer environment, can use distributed software agents to monitor response time and other metrics on IT components. The software also can work without distributed agents, using industry-standard APIs to collect performance metrics from servers and network devices.

NimBUS for VMware adds more than 40 health checks for virtual resources assigned by the virtual machine, such as systems, CPU, memory, disk and network I/O. The software is also equipped to check VMware's ESX server resources for the same metrics, and includes some 100 health checks for the operating system installed on the virtual machine. The software supports Windows, Linux and Unix plus NetWare. The company says NimBUS for VMware coupled with the service-level management metrics collected by the flagship NimBUS product can provide a complete picture of health and performance across the virtual and physical server environments.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.