Microsoft Goes Hetero: Want To Manage Cross-platform Physical And Virtual Environments

Microsoft Corp. wants to be the vendor of choice when it comes to managing cross-platform physical and virtual environments, and on Tuesday started shipping beta versions of its management applications that enable that capability.

The Redmond, Wash.-based vendor used its Microsoft Management Summit 2008, held this week in Las Vegas, to unveil a public beta for System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions, as well as a public beta for its System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Microsoft's server and tools business, discussed the two beta releases while outlining his company's strategy to enable dynamic IT organizations.

"At Microsoft we are helping redefine what it means to do IT management in the enterprise with the new capabilities we are announcing today," Muglia said in a statement. "By taking our knowledge of the Windows environment and expanding it to address heterogeneous management needs across platforms, applications, hardware and virtualization, we are opening up a new level of opportunity for companies to drive greater efficiency, responsiveness and value for their business."

The public beta for System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions builds on Microsoft's existing System Center Operations Manager 2007 technology, which provides end-to-end monitoring for enterprise IT environments.

The Cross Platform Extensions includes open source technologies, including Web Services for Management and OpenPegasus, to extend its management capabilities across both physical and virtual Windows and non-Windows operating systems and applications, including support for HP-UX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Sun Solaris, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating systems.

As part of the cross-platform management plan, Microsoft on Tuesday also said it is joining the OpenPegasus Steering Committee and will contribute code to the open source community under the Microsoft Public License.

The public beta for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, formerly code-named "Virtual Machine Manager vNext," lets customers configure and deploy new virtual servers and centrally manage them regardless of whether they are running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, or VMware ESX Server, Microsoft said.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 integrates with System Center Operations Manager 2007 to deliver a new Microsoft feature called Performance and Resource Optimization, or PRO. PRO identifies opportunities for efficient allocation of physical and virtual resources and offers suggestions to administrators via the Virtual Machine Manager console.

Spokespersons for Microsoft and VMware Inc., Palo Alto, Calif., were not available to discuss the new management applications.

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