As with the physical world - management - can mean a lot of different things in the virtual world.  Because it is such a broad term it allows companies to make statements that they can manage virtual infrastructure.  Microsoft’s SCVMM claims to manage VMWare infrastructure but how much does it really do and how efficient is it?  vCritical, which is a blog by a VMWare employee, does not give a very rosy view of its abilities.

CA CEO John Swainson made the statement at CA World in November:

I believe that management is the killer app for virtualization.  What I mean by that is that management is the technology that will allow virtualization to achieve its full potential — to deliver all the benefits that people have talked about for so long.

This is obviously the next big push for the large software houses and VMWare and Microsoft know this is where the battle is.  The real question is what does the VI Engineer need to help his world today?  Because management is such a broad term what is really important to the VI Engineer?

There was an interesting statment at the end of the CIO article referenced above - Managmenet is Killer App for Virtualization - where Nathaniel Martinez of IDC was talking about how because of the economic climate companies could be looking to take further advantage of management tools to maximize efficiency.  I agree with that but it would really seem that what people need are tools that go deep on specific pain points because companies are going to be very leary about laying out large sums on big management tools if they don’t solve real problems.

virtualization managment

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 at 1:49 pm and is filed under Virtual Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.