While there is a lot of talk these days about how to better manage virtual machines once they are deployed, it doesn't seem like too many people are focused on making sure things don't go wrong before the virtual machine is deployed.

That's what makes the latest 5.0 release of the CiRBA virtualization analysis tool pretty compelling. The CiRBA tool allows IT managers to create a three-dimensional model of the environment they are about to make virtual and perform what-if analysis. By using this tool IT managers might, for example, discover that while file servers lend themselves to virtual machine, there's a particular custom application that would not because overall performance would degrade.

The other thing that the CiRBA tool allows you to do is determine what application and business services are tied to what virtual machine. That can be a pretty handy tool to have because as virtual machine environments evolve IT managers are going to discover how dynamic these environments really are. And as we all know, dynamic is another code word for volatile.

What's new is version 5.0 of CiBRA is for IT managers to set alerts that automatically send notifications to them when there is a change to the virtual machine environment. This is helpful on two fronts. The first is when somebody decides to change the software load associated with any given virtual machine. The second is when somebody decides to fire up a new virtual machine.

The problem with virtual machines is that just about anybody can alter one or create a new one. This creates nothing short of a management headache generally referred to as virtual machine sprawl. What IT managers need is not only a tool that gives them foresight into how a particular virtual machine environment might behave, but also tells them when somebody is tinkering with the overall environment. As an added bonus, the CiRBA offering also includes tools to help determine the total cost of ownership of a virtual machine deployment and the amount of power being consumed by that deployment.

Tools that help manage virtual machine environments are going to be critical. But more often than not, getting the virtual machine deployment right in the first place is going to eliminate a lot of the problems that a systems management tool is going to try and solve after the fact. So as the saying goes, a virtual stitch in time should in the case of virtual machines really save nine.