IBM announces virtualization management tool

IBM announced new management software Thursday to govern many types of virtual machines. Virtualization lets multiple operating systems run simultaneously on the same computer to increase efficiency, and IBM's Virtualization Manager is a dashboard that lets administrators take actions such as allocating computing resources to virtual machines. The software can control IBM's own System p and System i servers as well as x86 servers running VMware, Xen and Microsoft virtualization foundations.

It's part of the Tivoli Systems Director package. One customer is Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, a German engineering and science research group, which is using the software to manage 2,000 servers, some using Xen and VMware.