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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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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...