IBM has extended its Systems Director range of management tools with the addition of Virtualization Manager, a graphical dashboard which shows the relationships between virtual and physical systems. 

This view of resource topology is designed to help clients manage virtual server environments for both IBM and non-IBM systems.

Virtualization Manager significantly reduces the number of management tools needed to support multiple types of servers.

The dashboard has a web-based interface allowing businesses to manage technology resources dynamically, and move workloads to areas of the data centre where they will be most productive.

It will also identify problems in the infrastructure, enlarge existing workloads and add or delete computing resources.

Virtualization Manager includes initial support for VMware, Microsoft Virtual Server, Xen and IBM Power-based virtualisation offerings.

Clients can also integrate VMware's VirtualCenter into IBM Director to provide a single point of management.

"System management is the next frontier of virtualisation," said Rich Lechner, vice president of virtualisation at IBM.

"As customers deploy more virtualisation and partitioning technology from multiple vendors, they will need more simplified management of these diverse virtualised infrastructures."

Lechner argues that, as organisations virtualise their IT environments, the management of those systems becomes more complex.

While clients may no longer have 200 physical computers to manage, they instead have to manage 200 diverse virtual computers associated with hundreds of physical servers.