By John W. Verity

Virtualization technology promises a great deal in the way of lower hardware expenditures, increased agility and further automation of IT operations. But to reap those and other benefits, and to take full advantage of the technology's unique capabilities, CIOs need the right tools. Most CIOs understand that virtualized environments are best monitored and managed not as self-contained silos of functionality, but as seamless extensions of the data center's overall infrastructure. Take "virtual sprawl." Virtualization makes it easy to provision new servers within minutes, yet the end user doesn't need to write a purchase order, the way he or she must do with physical servers. At the mere push of a button, users can deploy virtual machines that may not be properly documented or managed. And these machines can burn up far more server and storage capacity than might otherwise be needed.

Fortunately, new tools are available to help CIOs manage virtual servers as effectively as physical servers. By using the same workflows and processes to manage the two realms as one, CIOs can optimize the full range of data center resources as a single set of systems. In this way, they can attain optimal results, getting the most from their virtualization investment.

These tools can automatically discover and track, in real time, changing logical relationships between virtual and real resources, both hardware and software. This, in turn, facilitates the provisioning and migration of virtual machines and their accompanying software stacks across pools of physical servers in response to changing business conditions. Keeping track of all resources in a unified way also enables root-cause analysis for diagnosing faults across the entire IT landscape.

The new virtual-ready tools fully integrate the management of virtual and physical servers, delivering real-time views of resource utilization and applications and service performance levels through a single "pane of glass." Also, CIOs can apply to their virtual servers and other resources the full arsenal of methods for diagnosing, isolating and remedying faults. Integrated tools make help desks more effective, too, as policy-driven mechanisms route problems, when necessary, to specialized teams, thereby holding downtime to a minimum.