As desktop virtualization becomes more popular, the whole issues of command and control is going to start raising its ugly head.

As we have seen with virtual machines on the server, the ability to parse physical machines can put a lot pressure on the underlying physical infrastructure. For example, where you use to have on physical machine you could potentially have a half dozen instances of operating systems and their related applications all trying to access remote resources across the network.

What all this brings up is the need to, in some instances, block certain virtual machine implementations from using certain shared resources and, more commonly, throttle how much access any given virtual machine can have access to a shared resource at any given point in time.

Of course, in order to do any of that you have to be able to actually see what's going on as hundreds, and even potentially thousands, of virtual machines access network resources. That describes a lot of thinking that went into the development of vmSight, which last week released version 4.0 of its tool at VMworld. The vmSight tool basically works by tagging each virtual machine on the network and then keeps track of all the activity that each virtual machine generates on the network. IT managers can then use that data to determine how much access any given virtual machines should get to those resources.

What's intriguing about all this is that it sets up the possibility of effectively delivering remote services to virtual machines as a service. Basically, what an IT services provider could do would be create a desktop-as-a-service offering where all the compute power and related applications run on a server farm in the cloud.

There's a lot of talk these days about the implications of virtualization in the cloud. But one thing that is for certain that given the cost of managing IT, a lot of customers with limited IT resources that are supporting fixed applications, such as call centers, are probably going to find a utility approach to desktop computing services pretty compelling.