Earlier this year, we singled out Microsoft as one of the interesting vendors to watch in Grid in ’06 (ok, I didn’t exactly go out on a limb by singling out the biggest software player as an ‘interesting one to watch,’ but it is true that the Grid industry at large is seriously anticipating more specifics around how Microsoft intends to play in the space).Yesterday’s news on Microsoft’s virtualization intentions drew more questions than answers, and not a whole lot of meat on the bone for the Grid watchers.What I found pretty interesting was that within the announcement, Microsoft sort of unceremoniously announced that the virtualization roadmap will include a new “System Center Virtual Machine Manager.” For a company that’s NOT known for systems management, it’s just sort of interesting how little fanfare accompanies the “how do I manage VM’s” question that customers would invariably have (Robert Mitchell’s recent Computerworld article on the unique challenges of managing virtual machines is great reading on the topic). On a related note, it’s pretty amazing to consider how many vendors are scrambling to carve out ownership of this ‘managing virtual machines’ discussion. Among the vendors touting management solutions for virtual machines:> VMWare VirtualCenter Control> Levanta Intrepid M > IBM Virtual Machine Manager > HP Proliant > Cassatt Collage > ToutVirtual Inc. Virtual IQ> Platform VM Orchestrator > BMC Virtualizer > Opsware Server Automation System > Blade-Logic Operations Manager > Red Hat, XenSource, Intel and AMD are building interesting virtual machine management capabilities into Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 Those are just some of the bigger ones, off the top of my head. I’m sure I missed at least a 1/2 dozen to a dozen. But it’s a real sign of maturity for virtualization that the IQ of the industry discussion has evolved from the “what is virtualization” to the now “people are buying virtualization, and now they want tools to manage virtual environments.” Technology Industry