Are traditional management tools good enough for virtual servers?
Management vendors would answer, “Yes!” and for the most part, they have stepped up their support for virtual environments. From systems management market leaders such as CA to data center management players such as BladeLogic, vendors have partnered with or built APIs into VMware’s tools to enable the exchange of data and provide some metrics around the health and availability of virtual servers. Several vendors promise to provide virtual and physical management metrics such as CPU, disk and memory usage side by side, but IT managers need more than the basic information provided with some tools. “Yes, my existing management tools work just as well with virtual servers as any other server. The difference, however, is you don’t have the advantage of seeing the whole machine and manipulating that in the same tools you do the [virtual machines],” says Cars.com’s Christensen. “Visual representations of environments and good dashboards are key in managing a virtual environment.” Start-ups s
