With an installed base for virtualization management set to exceed four million by 2009, questions are popping up as to whether or not current management tools fit within this new virtual paradigm in the data center. 

According to a recent CBR article, managing a mixed physical and virtual data center currently presents a new set of challenges.

The biggest issue with the current crop of systems management tools is that they all rely upon manual policy setting, which, in the virtual world, becomes even more complex than it currently is. Imagine monitoring hundreds of virtual machines (VMs) and receiving many different alerts, which must have a corresponding policy, or be reverted to an operator for intervention. When, in this scenario, the organization wants to monitor a complete business service executing different applications on a range of physical and virtual environments, this requires many separate point solutions to be configured and integrated.

Systems management tool vendors are only now responding to the rise of virtualization as a technology, which is set to become widely adopted in most data centers in the next two to three years. The problem with this late arrival is that management tools are perceived as playing catch-up with the technology, which is rapidly evolving into many different solution architectures.

The policy from most of the major management tool vendors is to focus its attention on those technologies that its current user base needs management solutions for, and to enhance its existing policy-based solution accordingly. While this is a sensible approach for ensuring existing customers do not switch supplier, it does not provide a new approach for a new paradigm of IT operational requirements that virtualization brings. This situation has created a new generation of management tool vendors that are providing technology-neutral solutions to manage the physical and virtual infrastructure, using new approaches that enable the benefits of reduced management costs to be realized.

Read the entire article, here.