•  DynamicOps VRM was more of a VM library manager or provisioning rather than a full-fledged management package. It was also difficult to integrate, and lacked key features required for monitoring and managing VM infrastructure.

•  Insystek's TotalView possesses all the characteristics of a work in progress. There was lots of promise for things such as policy-based management, but TotalView crashed, had problems with its admittedly brand-new Hyper-V support, and was a source of intense deployment frustration.

Goals and test environment

Each management package had to work with two or more hypervisor platforms picked from a list consisting of VMware's ESX 3.5, Microsoft's Hyper-V and/or Citrix's Xenserver 5.0. We installed these hypervisors on a variety of hardware platforms (see ). And we installed the products under test on vendor recommended hardware and pointed them at VMs running across the multiple hypervisor hosting platforms supported by each.

Each VM management product was tested in five areas important to VM farm administrators: