Conclusions

If conserving VM sprawl was the marching order, the most important component of the tests was how each product maintained control over VM instances and the seemingly inevitable changes that VM instances go through in their life cycle.

We believe that running parallel, platform-specific management tools would cause the least amount of administrative pain at this juncture. But if you need to get some form of cross-platform VM management wares up and running immediately, then CA's NSM/ASM is the best option we tested.

Henderson and Allen are researchers for ExtremeLabs in Indianapolis. Contact them at kitchen-sink@extremelabs.com.