The proliferation of virtualization technologies across enterprise networks is exploding - and with this drive in the data center, IT professionals are beginning to realize that the ability to manage virtual applications, and integrate them into the physical layers is more of a challenge that many first thought. In fact, many of the early adopters are now convinced that these breakthrough technologies are creating as many systems management headaches as they solve.

At the same time, ISVs are beginning to discover that Virtual Appliances offer an incredibly economic way to package and distribute software - and if you believe Microsoft & VMware and others, this is THE way software will be distributed in the future. But the ISVs are also realizing that the management challenges surrounding Virtual Appliances are even worse than those often associated with traditional software and hardware appliances. Although the big system management and smaller niche management vendors are optimizing virtualization technologies in an attempt to integrate these breakthrough applications into their frameworks, the reality is that their offerings are making the data center even more undiscoverable, uncontrollable and upgradeable than
ever before.
The bottom line is while the hypervisor wars have begun with VMware and Microsoft leading the pact to drive Virtual Appliances into the data center, the major hardware players, OS vendors, and all the pure-play virtualization vendors, are attempting to address the same management challenges. It is now critical that IT needs to figure out how to integrate physical and virtual management into their networks quickly and with little effort.
The solution to this challenge is for the physical and virtual management vendors to demand that their device suppliers adopt a service-oriented approach to systems management and develop standards - based interfaces and functionality that can scale, be installed and be supported with minimal effort. Cisco Systems' recent announcement of their Service-Oriented Network Architecture (SONA) is just one example of integrating SOA-related management capabilities into a company's product lines and the IT community would be better served if all vendors, took a similar standards-based approach.