The two biggest challenges facing IT organizations when it comes to virtualization are finding enough people with the skills to deploy and manage virtual machines and then being able to get them the tools they need to get the most out of those people.
There isn't a lot vendors can do about finding people with virtualization skills but VMware and Tripwire deserve some credit for helping out on the tools front. The two companies have signed a pact under which Tripwire will make available for free a version of a utility that helps IT people configure virtual machines.
The vast majority of mistakes that are made when deploying virtual machines, or for that matter any other piece software, is when it is being configured. The Tripwire utility is designed to reduce the complexity associated with VMware by giving people a tool that helps them to check whether they got the virtual machine configuration right in the first place. When it comes to an ounce of prevention, this utility could be worth its weight in gold because it's still early day when it comes to virtualization. That means that due to a lack of experience, the odds are good that an inordinate number of virtual machines deployed toady are not configured correctly. That could open the door to all kinds of potential security and performance down the road.
Tripwire has also made available a remediation guide that essentially serves as a tool to educate people about the best practices associated with configuring virtual machines, which could be seen as a first step towards educating more people about how to support virtual machines.
None of this means that IT organizations won't need a complete suite of virtualization management tools. In fact, Tripwire is hoping that people will like this utility enough to buy their suite of configuration tools for managing both physical and virtual servers.
VMware has independently released tools that automate a lot of the patch management and update process, but configuration has been a hole in the VMware line up so it's nice to see VMware take a minute to help people that are already dealing with virtualization versus spending all its time thinking about how to increase the size of the VMware universe by getting one more virtual machine installation out there. Of course, given the fact that all those support calls go to VMware anyway, maybe this pact with Tripwire is in their best interests after all.