Virtualization can impact management in several ways. Virtualization can result in changes to existing management tools and procedures, and it may introduce the need for new management tools. Indeed, virtualization management is emerging as a competitive market segment in its own right, which may justify the development of a separate evaluation for virtualization management solutions.

In the meanwhile, at a high level, some of the key areas of differentiation for virtual machines platforms related to management include the strength of their consoles through which virtualized infrastructures are controlled; the availability of distributed resource management facilities, which automate the process of matching virtual machines with the resources needed to run their workloads at appropriate service levels; support for consolidated backup, in which the process of backing up virtual machine state can be offloaded to dedicated hosts; support for industry-standard network management protocols; and support for industry-standard server provisioning standards, which enable spare physical servers to be rapidly configured with a virtual machine monitor or hypervisor.

Click on one of the links below to see how the studied virtual machine platforms compare for supporting these manageability features:

	Management Console (4 ratings)
	Distributed Resource Management (4 ratings)
	Consolidated Backup (4 ratings)
	Wake-on LAN Support (4 ratings)
	PXE Support (4 ratings)