VMworld 2008: Top 10 Products

BMC released a raft of management tools adapted to incorporate virtual and physical systems into a unified view to support business processes.

The CiRBA Placement Intelligence Technology package assesses physical, business and capacity metrics with the goal of determining the best placement of virtual machines.

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Now with a virtual appliance, KBOX, to match its physical management tool, KACE has a systems management tool that provides inventory, software distribution, patch and help desk functions.

Among the very large number of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure vendors, Moka5 looked interesting because of its management tools. Look for lots of activity in the VDI space in the coming months.

I’m looking at Check Point Software Technologies’ VPN-1 virtual appliance in the lab now, so look for the review shortly. Putting security inside the virtual environment efficiently is one of the big challenges facing IT managers. Look for other products to compete in this space.

VMware’s application virtualization product is gaining important new scalability features, and is one to watch in this competitive space. See my review here.

ThinLaunch Software turns existing business-class PCs into thin-client devices, thus controlling the end-user space more effectively while doing one of the things that virtualization does best-

Shavlik performs a dandy trick by getting offline VMs patched with a minimum of fuss. (This is the heart of VMware’s Update Manager.) You can see my review here.

Every once in a while a hard-to-understand product draws my attention. So TriCerat finishes out my list by (I think) providing VDI management tools.