Kuzmack is also beta-testing Virtual-Center 2. One component, Data Resource Scheduler, aggregates servers into pools that can be assigned to groups and managed through policies that the administrator creates. "We can take a group of physical servers and carve them up into resource pools where we can set high-level and low-level limits and resource guarantees," he says. Another feature, Distributed Availability Service, automatically moves virtual machines to a new physical server and restarts them after a physical server fails.

Kuzmack is also working on basic monitoring. He wants to integrate VMware's Vi

rtualCenter control software with Gannett's Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) software. Other than basic performance metrics, "we haven't determined what we want to expose to the MOM console yet," he says.

Jim Ni, senior technical product manager at Microsoft Corp., says the company is working on adding more virtual machine management capabilities to its management tools, but it's not there quite yet. For example, Systems Management Server can manage physical machine image libraries but can't differentiate between an image for a physical machine and a virtual machine image.

Poppleton is using VirtualCenter but says he also needs more cross-platform tools. "Right now, we're a VMware shop, but in the future that may not be true," he says. He's considering using VirtualIQ, a virtual machine management tool suite being developed by ToutVirtual Inc. in Carlsbad, Calif. It supports automated provisioning, capacity management and security. He's also looking at tools for "grid-style management of physical and virtual systems," such as VM Orchestrator from Platform Computing Inc. in Markham, Ontario. VMO optimizes capacity by dynamically allocating and controlling virtual machine resources and utilization levels based on user- defined policies.