Yesterday Opsware announced the virtual machine management product the company sketched out at its OPSWorld user conference in September. Called Opsware Virtualization Director, the software will be available as an add-on module to Opsware Server Automation System 6 come January. Virtualization Director extends Opsware's prodigious server lifecycle management capabilities to VMware ESX hosts and guests, and to S Yesterday Opsware announced the virtual machine management product the company sketched out at its OPSWorld user conference in September. Called Opsware Virtualization Director, the software will be available as an add-on module to Opsware Server Automation System 6 come January. Virtualization Director extends Opsware’s prodigious server lifecycle management capabilities to VMware ESX hosts and guests, and to Solaris 10 Containers, allowing users to apply the same policies and best practices for provisioning, patching, and configuration management to virtual servers and physical servers alike. In the initial release, Virtualization Director will allow Opsware SAS users to (click to view screen images): Create, start, stop, and delete VMware ESX virtual machines and Solaris Zones Track relationships between VMware and Solaris hosts and guests Discover and visualize the dependencies among hypervisors and virtual machines View and manage physical and virtual servers togetherOpsware said that a subsequent release would tighten the integration with the VMware and Solaris Container management systems to support additional capabilities such as live virtual machine migration via VMware’s VMotion. Support for Xen, and perhaps even Microsoft’s “Viridian” platform, is also slated for the next release. Technology Industry