This week’s article "Virtualization Management: Time to Get Serious" on Information Week is a great read. It covers many important topics, raises key questions, and provides good background data that any IT Management executive building virtualization tools will find useful. Here are some interesting points to consider –

• "More than half of the survey respondents who’ve embraced virtualization rely on the built-in tool provided by their hypervisor vendor, whether it’s VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, or someone else. This leaves them with two sets of tools to manage–one for the physical servers and one for the virtual environment. Only 10% of organizations have invested the time and money to implement a server management system that provides a single framework. The rest either use legacy tools that don’t adequately handle a virtual environment, or they’re doing nothing at all."

• "The decision for most companies naturally comes back to how much they can rely on the tools of the virtualization vendors themselves. VMware and Citrix have solid tools for managing their environments, and they’re perfect for the initial deployment and setup. But eventually the rest of the operations must be integrated, especially as virtualization moves beyond the server to infrastructure and desktops. In addition, mixed platforms are the reality. VMware still dominates, but a whopping 64% of organizations use or plan to use more than one vendor’s hypervisor."

If these data points represent the broader market (since we don’t know the sample composition) – it indicates that there is a lot of room for growth for multi-vendor virtualization management capabilities. Eventually, as organizations move towards managing not only the infrastructure but also the “Service” – specialist tools would need to interact (via federation) or completely give way to consolidated platforms that can bring together an end-to-end view.

What strikes us most with some players that are active in this space – is the level of innovation in tools that is occurring in the sub $ 5,000 category targeted at small and mid size organizations.

For larger enterprises the innovation spectrum has already moved on to automation and policy management via virtual machine and resource orchestration. The adaptive/ dynamic world is finally here – and IT management needs to get smarter, simpler and more embedded into the active intervention process.
 

- Ronnie