IBM has announced a new release of its premier virtualization management software that adds powerful new capabilities for simplifying the management of virtual and physical systems across multiple platforms. In addition, the software is now available on POWER-based servers, leveraging the expanded virtualization capabilities recently announced with the launch of the POWER6 microprocessor.

IBM Systems Director Virtualization Manager offers a Web-based user interface that allows customers to simplify basic virtualization management tasks such as identifying potential outage issues or shifting computing resources. Easing the management of these tasks can help customers reduce complexity by providing an integrated view of virtual and physical system resource usage, lower IT costs through simplified administration, and increase energy efficiency by optimizing system utilization. IBM Systems Director Virtualization Manager integrates and complements existing virtualization capabilities on IBM systems such as Hardware Management Console (HMC) and Integrated Virtualization Manager (IVM) on POWER.

The new release of IBM Systems Director Virtualization Manager will offer integrated support for POWER systems, simplifying the management of POWER hardware and virtual partitions from a single set of interfaces. This expanded support will offer better visibility of resources on POWER systems so that customers have better access to utilization information across POWER servers including CPU, memory, network and disk resources. The software will now discover the virtualized resources of the Virtual I/O server (VIOS), allow a view of the CPU utilization for IVM-managed systems, and show the POWER Hypervisor view of CPU utilization.

This expanded support gives customers the ability to view the relationship between physical and virtual servers and quickly determine what resources are being used by which servers via an easy-to-use Web interface. This release also includes additional support for x86 environments including integration with Storage Configuration Manager for more fully integrated server and storage management.

IBM will introduce two new tools for availability management and image management with the new release of Virtualization Manager. IBM Systems Director Virtual Availability Management will allow customers using Xen-based virtualization on x86-based environments to create a high availability farm to help manage and respond to unplanned host and virtual server outages and to simplify maintenance and migration tasks. As part of this offering, IBM will unveil industry first technology that provides secure live relocation for Xen virtual machines with little to no downtime in response to predictive host and virtual server failures. This technology ensures virtual machine viability via check-pointing, compatibility checking, and rollback capabilities

The second tool, IBM Systems Director Virtual Image Management, will provide a single, unified view of different types of system templates and server images to help customers manage and deploy their systems. This new offering will allow customers to easily deploy new virtual servers based on virtual system templates and images. The templates can be used to create, customize, and clone virtual images on all supported hypervisors and x86, AMD- and POWER-based systems.

"As virtualization becomes ubiquitous, the management of the data center has become more complex," said Rich Lechner, vice president, IT Optimization at IBM. "Customers need a management platform that works across the data center and allows them to manage the physical and virtual resources to quickly and flexibly respond to business requirements. IBM sees management as the next era of virtualization technology and we are delivering technology and tools to help customers simplify the tasks involved in managing their IT infrastructures."

The Systems Director family also provides a seamless integration to full cross-enterprise service management capabilities using Tivoli software solutions. These Tivoli software solutions provide a service management platform that enables process automation and integration to achieve the operational efficiencies and effectiveness that our customers demand for their IT environments. IBM Systems Director Virtualization Manager V1.2 will be available in the third quarter of 2007.