Seems like these days not a moment can go by without some vendor or another announcing a tool to better manage virtual servers and clients.
The latest offering in this space consists of version 2.0 of the Enterprise Virtualization Management suite from ManageIQ. This new offering adds support for more detailed discovery of virtual machines, better tools for creating configuration baselines, increased ability to map dependencies between virtual machines and better reporting tools.
ManageIQ is one of a handful of companies that have specifically developed products to manage virtual environments. The question that the existence of these companies raises is why IT organizations need these tools when they already have a plethora of existing systems management tools.
Companies such as IBM, CA, BladeLogic and Hewlett-Packard have all made specific commitments to extend their tools for managing physical servers to virtual machine environments. The conventional wisdom that follows from those commitments is that IT organizations won't need or want additional tools or vendors to manage virtual machines given the fact that they can have one set of tools to manage both physical and virtual servers.
But companies such as ManageIQ and DynamicOps argue that virtual machines represent a paradigm shift that will essentially obsolete existing management tools that were built mostly to deal with issues associated with client/server computing era.
More importantly, as virtualization continues to evolve, management tools are going to deal with a lot more complex issues beyond the server. Applications are going to evolve into virtual services that will be dynamically delivered over multiple stacks of virtual machines.
That would mean that the tools needed to manage virtual environments are going to have to quickly evolve to deal with what amounts to a reinvention of enterprise computing. So even if the established systems management vendors can add support for virtual machines today there is some doubt about how quickly they will be able to keep up with a rapidly changing enterprise computing landscape.
Over the next few months this debate is going to be playing out across most of the IT departments that will be wrestling with virtual machine sprawl. At stake is nothing less than the millions of dollars in research and development that companies such as IBM, CA and HP have spent over the last 25 years to build systems management empires that might be more fragile than most people think.