VMware administrators seem hard-pressed to give up on using VMware vCenter Server to manage their virtual data centers. That's been good news for VMware, as the company expands its virtualization management software stack.

But if these virtualization shops continue to mix other hypervisor platforms into their environments, virtual administrators may have no choice but to invest in third-party management tools in order to maintain control over a growing heterogeneous hypervisor infrastructure. They may even start giving Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) more consideration, which would probably get under VMware's corporate skin pretty quick.

Thanks to a bit of VMware vExpert sleuthing back in October 2010, we speculated that VMware could be planning to support Microsoft Hyper-V and Xen virtualization hypervisor platforms in some form or fashion. Now, only four months later, speculation has turned into reality.

VMware Lab engineers have pushed out a new and useful plug-in tool for the VMware community. This is the group responsible for creating interesting tools, dubbed "flings," which are intended to be free, short-term solutions. VMware says these types of tools are intended to be played with and explored, but that they do not come with VMware support and therefore shouldn't be used in your production environment.

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Read the entire article on InfoWorld Virtualization Report.