Virtualization: Forget about the hypervisor; get into management

Most of the parties out there, we have already covered (except Platespin, I did chat with some one via email but somehow we couldn't pick it up from there).

Anyways, we are into the next phase, Virtualization 2.0. There are other parties, which I have spoken to, who will also invade these adjacent territories, making the battle even more intense. I've spoken to CEOs who are going to really give firms like CA, HP etc a big headache. These guys are going for the big market, with faster, agile appliances. All deployable without any Forge hardware. But I'm sure the Platespin guys have something to tell me I don't know ;-)

P.S: You will see more of the little, fatless, light-weight firms challenging other little (with some fat) start-ups. So you get my point: The battle is between zero-fat VS some-fat. Overweight folks have a BIG problem.

Here's IW's coverage:

At the same time, newcomers such as Embotics, PlateSpin, and Veeam are expanding the list of tools with which virtual machines may be managed.

After months of describing virtualization as a feature of the operating system, Microsoft relented Nov. 12 and decided its Hyper-V hypervisor, formerly Viridian, would be available as a standalone product. Lost in the shuffle was the upgrade to System Center management tools, which now include System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 to provision new virtual machines, centrally monitor and manage running virtual machines, ensure virtual machine security, and update virtual machines.

Virtual Machine Manager is meant to work with Microsoft's other System Center products, including System Center Operations Manager 2007, released earlier this year. Operations Manager monitors and manages the servers running in the data center, according to Bob Kelly, corporate VP of servers and tools, in his address at the TechEd IT Forum 2007 on Nov. 12 in Barcelona, Spain.

Read the rest here.