PlateSpin this week is expected to enhance its application virtualization management software.

The company says that PowerRecon 2.0, together with the company's PowerConvert migration tool, bring traditional data centers into balance between their applications and the hardware they are running on. The typical data center contains virtual machines, physical servers, blade servers and image archives for restoring different servers in the event of failure.

The big problem is that once applications, operating system and settings are installed on a server, those applications are tied to the hardware. Moving those elements from one server to another is a lot of work; you have to re-provision the operating system, re-install all the applications and databases for the new server environments.

IT ends up with underutilized servers or smaller servers running Windows drawing on 99% of resources. There is an imbalance between resource demand and the servers available to handle it.

PowerConvert moves applications, operating systems and settings from one machine to another to balance workload.

PowerRecon lets IT automatically monitor the performance of the virtualized network. It automates the process of measuring across the data center. Traditionally, IT will manually gather an inventory of the servers installed in the network and the applications they run. They will then try to cobble together utilization statistics.

PowerRecon 2.0 uses an agentless technology. It can be installed on a Linux or Windows laptop or server, where it gathers an inventory of the servers active on the network. It offers IT customizable reports of CPU and disk utilization. PowerRecon 2.0 discovers all applications and operating systems running on servers.

This new version of PowerRecon has been completely overhauled, PlateSpin claims. IT can gather much more information on the servers in their networks and the product has a new GUI, which makes management and visualization easier.

PowerRecon is priced on a per server/day basis. For instance if you have 500 servers, you could monitor them for one day. If you have 250 servers, you could monitor them for two days. A typical installation starts at $32 per server per month. The product will be available this week.