Users will face a challenge managing hypervisors from different
software providers, because the technology to manage both physical
servers and virtual machines (VM) in a datacentre is still
evolving.
Neil Macehiter, research director at Macehiter Ward-Dutton, said
system management software had not matured enough to enable IT
departments to
manage virtual machine hypervisors from different suppliers and
physical servers from a single user interface. Although users can
buy individual products to manage different aspects of their
physical and virtual datacentre environment, a single product to
manage both is still not available.
The situation will become more complicated with the launch of
Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor. Businesses that run the
VMWare ESX
platform may decide to reduce
licence costs by offloading some non-critical applications from
ESX to the Microsoft virtual machine. Running hypervisors from two
suppliers poses additional system management problems.
Tony Lock, programme director at Freeform Dynamics, said
major suppliers such as IBM, CA and BMC were working on
building management of hypervisors into their products, but very
little progress had been made in developing standards to support
virtualisation management that would work across different
hypervisors.