The new Unicenter Advanced Systems Management r11.1 will support systems with virtualized servers and server clusters through a single interface, said Paula Daley, director of ASM marketing at CA. The same commands can be used by IT workers to manage virtual systems from VMware Inc., Microsoft Corp., Red Hat Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM.

The latest version relies on Microsoft's SQL Server management database, replacing earlier versions' use of the Ingres database, she said. That earlier version, r11, provided management for Microsoft virtualization as well as VMware.

John Coleman, manager of technology services at Wellspan Health in York, Pa., said he has been successfully testing the new release for about six weeks and hopes to use it to manage VMware and IBM virtual systems in January, with Microsoft systems added later next year.

"With virtualization, you don't have the physical equipment to touch for management, and things are always in constant flux," Coleman said. The first virtualization software at Wellspan, from VMware, went live about nine months ago.

Coleman said that every virtualization vendor has a different management console, making the ASM tool valuable in a heterogeneous data center such as Wellspan's. When Wellspan needs to reallocate computing tasks to different virtual machines based on demand changes, such a management tool comes in handy. "We can be dynamic," he said.