Both ToutVirtual and Platform Computing currently support VMware, but both have also announced plans to support Microsoft Virtual Server and the open-source Xen virtual machine monitor. In the interim, Poppleton's staff has had to develop some of its own tools.

"We're in the first phases of automated provisioning," he says, adding that Qualcomm wrote its own utilities because it couldn't find a tool that met all its needs.

Christopher Ware, assistant vice president of technology services at a Wall Street brokerage house, recently deployed BMC Virtualizer, an orchestration and provisioning tool that's part of a suite of virtual machine management tools from Houston-based BMC Software Inc. "It gives us policy-driven responses to resource utilization issues," he says. The tool also can support virtual machines created with Xen, VMware and Virtual Iron, all of which are running at the brokerage.

Like other cross-platform tools, Virtualizer integrates with APIs from VMware and other virtual machine software to automate the execution of those proprietary tools. For example, Virtualizer supports the automated movement of virtual machines between physical servers in VMware environments using VMotion.

Ware, whose company prefers to remain anonymous, says that getting BMC Virtualizer to work with all of his virtual machines wasn't exactly a plug-and-play experience -- especially since no common standards exist. In his environment, "there was a significant amount of coding and customization required to do a lot of the virtual provisioning," he says, and that accounted for the bulk of the deployment costs. A BMC spokesman says the product works out of the box with more than 50 applications.