Managing thousands of desktops, applications, and servers is incredibly complex and requires a vast amount of resources. In traditional, static environments, where every layer of the stack is linked to another layer, much manual labor is required to provision, upgrade, change, or remove elements of the infrastructure. Virtualizing the entire computing infrastructure provides tremendous time and cost-savings, as well as flexibility benefits. However, using different tools for virtualized resources can result in duplicate or competing processes for managing resources, adding complexity to the IT infrastructure. And it can undermine the benefits of virtualization. A virtualized world that isn't well-managed can be less reliable and perhaps even more expensive than its non-virtualized counterpart.

Centrally Manage Virtual and Physical Assets

Centralized, policy-based management—of both virtual and physical assets—enables you to fully realize the potential of end-to-end virtualization. It lets IT handle enterprise-wide provisioning and change management from a central location. This vastly reduces the resources and time needed to administer the infrastructure, and enables you to be much more agile and responsive to business needs.

Microsoft's Centralized Management Solutions

Microsoft enables you to tackle centralized management on many fronts. Microsoft System Center—a family of system management products—lets you manage physical and virtual server assets with a unified platform. With System Center Virtual Machine Manager, you can manage the conversion of multiple physical servers into virtual assets, and enable IT administrators and authorized users to rapidly provision VMs. System Center Configuration Manager 2007 extends your ability to streamline management processes by simplifying change and configuration management of the virtualized data center. To make health monitoring of physical and virtual machines more efficient, use System Center Operations Manager 2007. And to provide continuous data protection on physical and virtual machines for backup and business continuity, you can add System Center Data Protection Manager to the mix. All of these solutions are operated in the same way that you are used to doing with Microsoft System Center on physical assets, so that you can leverage your existing skills and expertise.

Application management can also be centralized and simplified with policy-based solutions. Application Virtualization lets you easily set policies for users, applications and delivery via a centralized console, and then turn much of the daily management over to the system itself. Assigning and changing applications is simple through Active Directory. When you are ready for a new application, you just bring it up and assign it to users. If there is an issue, or you want to terminate the application or the rights, simply disable the application in the management console and it is gone.