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The Top 5 Features to Look for in VM Management

Industry insiders recommend the top features to look for in a solution to manage performance in the virtual environment.

1. Integration of Physical and Virtual Environments

“Look for a tool that integrates physical and virtual environments into a single pane of glass,” says Olivier Thierry, CMO of Zenoss. “You don’t want to create more silos.”

Thierry warns that it is very easy to establish a new silo of tools and operations staff to handle the virtual environment, but this only makes business service management more complex.

“You will always have a mixed environment of physical and virtual,” agrees Troy DuMoulin, ITIL Service Manager, AVP Product Strategy, Pink Elephant. “I can see the logic of having a single tool that allows you to manage both physical and virtual. You want one management interface that allows you to model and manage all different types of objects, regardless of where they are.”

2. End-to-End Visibility

“End-to-end visibility is a requirement,” says Javier Soltero, Chief Technology Officer for Management Products for SpringSource, a division of VMware. “You need the ability to see not just the hypervisor but through the guest operating system and whatever application components are running inside of that guest.”

3. Change Awareness

“Look for a tool that understands the dynamics of motion,” Thierry advises.

Javier Soltero defines this as “change awareness”, noting, “In a virtual environment, you have the ability to move workloads, and start and stop workloads as whole machines, basically by just going to vCenter and dragging things around, and starting and stopping them. You need to have a management tool that successfully operates within that environment.”

Soltero says the tool must honor the fact that when you VMotion from one hypervisor to the other, nothing happened from the perspective of the guest operating system in the application. On the other hand, from the hypervisor perspective, the tool must also recognize that you actually moved this workload from this vSphere host to another, and make sure that was successful and had no impact on the application running on top of it.

4. Built for the New Virtual Environment

“Many legacy tools just build virtualization management onto their products,” warns Thierry. “Unless the tool has a real-time model with dependency mapping configuration built into it, the tool will not be able to do it.”

“Look for a tool that has been purpose-built for this new virtual world,” he continues. “You can’t take a 1930s car and bolt on a brand new turbo charger. It was not designed for that.”

5. Cost Effectiveness

“Look for a management tool that is cost-effective,” Thierry concludes. “The reason for virtualization is to save money, so you do not want to go back and add a seven-figure systems management tool on top of that. The last thing you want to do is take a brand new cost-effective agile platform and dump a whole bunch of legacy, inappropriate, expensive, cumbersome, complex tooling on top. The cost equation must be maintained.”

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The Top 5 Features to Look for in VM Management

Industry insiders recommend the top features to look for in a solution to manage performance in the virtual environment.

1. Integration of Physical and Virtual Environments

“Look for a tool that integrates physical and virtual environments into a single pane of glass,” says Olivier Thierry, CMO of Zenoss. “You don’t want to create more silos.”

Thierry warns that it is very easy to establish a new silo of tools and operations staff to handle the virtual environment, but this only makes business service management more complex.

“You will always have a mixed environment of physical and virtual,” agrees Troy DuMoulin, ITIL Service Manager, AVP Product Strategy, Pink Elephant. “I can see the logic of having a single tool that allows you to manage both physical and virtual. You want one management interface that allows you to model and manage all different types of objects, regardless of where they are.”

2. End-to-End Visibility

“End-to-end visibility is a requirement,” says Javier Soltero, Chief Technology Officer for Management Products for SpringSource, a division of VMware. “You need the ability to see not just the hypervisor but through the guest operating system and whatever application components are running inside of that guest.”

3. Change Awareness

“Look for a tool that understands the dynamics of motion,” Thierry advises.

Javier Soltero defines this as “change awareness”, noting, “In a virtual environment, you have the ability to move workloads, and start and stop workloads as whole machines, basically by just going to vCenter and dragging things around, and starting and stopping them. You need to have a management tool that successfully operates within that environment.”

Soltero says the tool must honor the fact that when you VMotion from one hypervisor to the other, nothing happened from the perspective of the guest operating system in the application. On the other hand, from the hypervisor perspective, the tool must also recognize that you actually moved this workload from this vSphere host to another, and make sure that was successful and had no impact on the application running on top of it.

4. Built for the New Virtual Environment

“Many legacy tools just build virtualization management onto their products,” warns Thierry. “Unless the tool has a real-time model with dependency mapping configuration built into it, the tool will not be able to do it.”

“Look for a tool that has been purpose-built for this new virtual world,” he continues. “You can’t take a 1930s car and bolt on a brand new turbo charger. It was not designed for that.”

5. Cost Effectiveness

“Look for a management tool that is cost-effective,” Thierry concludes. “The reason for virtualization is to save money, so you do not want to go back and add a seven-figure systems management tool on top of that. The last thing you want to do is take a brand new cost-effective agile platform and dump a whole bunch of legacy, inappropriate, expensive, cumbersome, complex tooling on top. The cost equation must be maintained.”

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The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

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Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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