ZDNet Blogger Dan Kusnetzky speaks with Rackspace CTO, John Engates, to get a technology consumer's view of the state of virtualization technology today.  The company is managing roughly 30,000 servers hosted in 7 data centers around the world.  

John pointed out that Rackspace has evaluated most of the single-vendor and open source tools available today and found that they simply are not up to handling the scale of the Rackspace environment. Most of the management tools that are available today were designed to manage tens, hundreds, or, perhaps, thousands of servers. Tens of thousands of servers, on the other hand, would be beyond their scope.

So, John and his team have taken the approach of segmenting their environment and then using available tools to manage each segment. Rackspace developed tools are being used to orchestrate these tools. While speaking about the tools that Rackspace has built to orchestrate the tools offered by vendors, John commented how pleased with the management tools being offered by VMware. He commented that they were robust and well supported.

Although I wouldn't place myself in John's league and know that my friends will be surprised, I was happy to be able to add a few useful thoughts during the conversation. I was able to introduce John to tools offered by Cassatt, Hyperic, Novell and Virtual Iron. It appeared to me that one or more of these company's offerings might be useful in the Racksapce environment.

Although Rackspace's environment is different than that found in most large-company data centers today, it is very much like the data center these same large companies are moving towards. More and more of the time, large organizations are treating their data centers as internal "hosting companies." John welcomed a dialog with internal hosting company managers.

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