Quoting eChannel Line
A hypervisor is simply a scheme that allows multiple operating environments to run in virtual machines on a single system at the same time. By using a hypervisor, a single server or desktop could host four or five (or more) different operating systems. And a hundred servers or desktops could thus run four or five hundred different virtual machines. Can you spell s-y-s-t-e-m m-a-n-a-g-e-m-e-n-t h-e-a-d-a-c-h-e? I thought you could. Now compound this problem by adding virtualization software to the picture, which allows all of the individual virtual machines created by a hypervisor to be pooled. Resources in these pools can then be made available to applications that need access to additional computing power. And just for fun, don't use one vendor's virtualization environment use four or five different proprietary virtualization solutions to create separately managed resource pools. And then take two aspirin& For enterprises with mixed platform environments, today's virtualization market resembles the picture above. If you bought HP servers, you likely bought HP's Virtual Server Environment to virtualize them. If you bought Intel-based systems, you likely bought EMC's VMware to virtualize them. If you bought IBM servers, you may have bought IBM's Virtualization Engine to manage them. And because there is not single standard hypervisor or virtualization scheme operating across all of these disparate environments, information technology (IT) buyers have been forced to buy discrete best-of-breed solutions to virtualize and manage the virtualization of each environment.
When IBM recently announced the availability of its IBM Virtualization Manager, the company unveiled a single product that aims to help enterprise IT managers manage the various hypervisors and virtualized resources that reside within their datacenters. With IBM Virtualization Manager, a systems administrator can control Intel-based servers that are running EMC's VMware or Microsoft's Virtual Server virtualization schema, or Linux servers running Xen and/or IBM POWER-based servers. And IBM intimated that these are just the initial virtualization environments it would support (making us wonder if Sun's N1 and HP Virtual Server Environments might someday be supported, too). What does this mean for IT managers? With IBM Virtualization Manager, IT managers and administrators can make use of a single, web-based dashboard with a common, graphically driven user interface to redirect workloads toward available resource pools, identify infrastructure problems, or add / delete virtual machines residing on distributed servers or desktops. In addition, IBM's Virtualization Manager is part of IBM's Systems Director, an overarching unified management software environment that provides a slew of other monitor and control functions, such as backups and software distribution for IBM systems environments.
What does this mean for IBM's competitors? HP offers a functionally equivalent management umbrella to IBM's System Director known as Systems Insight Manager (SIM). HP needs to introduce this management of virtualization managers capability into SIM immediately to help customers simplify cross-platform virtualization management (and nip in the bud any interest in IBM's solution). Sun should do this as part of its N1 initiative but given the limited market acceptance of N1, Sun customers might really be better off using IBM's solution. EMC, with VMware, has shown interest in managing Xen environments, but little to no interest in managing IBM POWER- or HP Itanium-based environments. So VMware may choose to manage its own systems and ignore the rest and still do quite nicely.
What does this mean for IBM in the short/long term? In the short term, IBM will be the only major vendor capable of providing overarching management of virtualization managers. This advantage should help IBM grow sales as this product really addresses a serious pain point in virtualized systems deployment and management. In the long term, it is reasonable to expect HP to build a similar product, but in the meantime, IBM should be able to gain both market success and goodwill from its unique virtualization products and services. Overall, we see IBM Virtualization Manager as a huge step in the right direction in the virtualization marketplace, one that took us by surprise. But this manager of virtualization managers was sorely needed and should serve to accelerate the pace of enterprise-wide virtualization deployment.
Read the original, here.