Virtualization technology is a key building block for next generation enterprise datacenters and infrastructure. Though several vendors (Citrix, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle and VMware) have stepped up their virtualization offerings to the market, a void remains in the undeveloped area of managing and optimizing those virtualized environments and devices once they are in place. As the number of virtual servers increases, system administrators quickly find themselves in fire-fighting mode. Existing server monitoring tools are not virtualization aware and are unable to take into account the shared resource dependency between host and virtual machine.

Though IT managers are figuring out how to support different applications and operating systems on a single server, or how to dynamically allocate resources among storage devices, or how to take device utilization from 20 percent to 70 percent, the coordinated and automated management and optimization of this virtualized infrastructure remains elusive.

ToutVirtual is automating and simplifying the virtualization intelligence process with its VirtualIQ software which helps enterprises move virtualization through the various stages of virtualization. There are three stages (3Ds) of virtualization - design, deploy, and deliver. At each stage, users face different virtualization management challenges.

For instance, in the design stage, the issues are physical-to-virtual (P-V) migration, calculating ROI, platform selection, how to decide which applications get consolidated on which hosts, resource optimization, and so forth. In the deploy stage, the challenges are managing available server capacity, controlling virtual server sprawl, performance optimization, and resource dependency just to name a few. In the deliver stage, the hurdles are managing heterogeneous virtual environments, service-delivery optimization, policy-based actions like spinning a new virtual machine, and more. ToutVirtual provides a single, integrated console to optimize each scenario.

ToutVirtual provides a vendor-neutral perspective to your virtualization decisions. Whether you have to decide on which applications to virtualize, which hardware vendor to choose, which hypervisor to use, or how to do more with virtualization we can provide you with the virtual intelligence you need. VirtualIQ supports all the major virtualization platform vendors including: Citrix, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle and VMware.

Better Virtualization Intelligence = Better Virtualization Decisions. It's that simple.

Our mission: Enable enterprises to automate their virtual platforms with timely virtualization intelligence for a simpler, flexible and more efficient IT.

According to Tim Grieser, program vice president for system management software at analyst firm IDC, "The rapid spread of virtualization on Intel architecture platforms is increasing the need for software tools to effectively manage these environments. Multi-function tools that can manage across a variety of environments, such as VirtualIQ from ToutVirtual, are increasingly needed by IT to monitor and control their virtualized resources." Grieser added, "This type of software provides leverage so that IT can efficiently manage the increasing complexity of virtualized infrastructures and virtual machines."

According to William Fellows, principal analyst, The 451 Group, "We don't see anyone else with such fine-grained virtual machine (VM) management at this point."

"ToutVirtual's VirtualIQ Pro console addresses a very important need in the support of heterogeneous virtualization environments," says Andi Mann, research director at Enterprise Management Associates. "In an easy-to-use, functional and affordable interface, VirtualIQ Pro helps users get greater value from virtualization deployments by integrating, in a single console, several core disciplines like capacity planning, load balancing and automated VM management."

According to Joe Clabby, president, Clabby Analytics, "For small and mid-sized businesses that have failed to adopt virtualization due to cost, complexity, and proof issues, this [ToutVirtual] design may be just the ticket to get them to experiment with systems virtualization."

According to Rachel Chalmers, senior analyst for enterprise software group, The 451 Group, "Like ToutVirtual, we see a future of heterogeneous virtualization platforms - both bare-metal hypervisors from VMware, the Xen open source project and (eventually) Microsoft, and operating-system-hosted virtualization from Microsoft, Sun, SWsoft and VMware. IT operators and systems administrators are going to want platform-neutral, performance aware management tools to run across all these. ToutVirtual is already selling one."