Until now, the industry has been looking to the blade server vendors to provide management tools for blade servers. On the surface, this looks like a reasonable expectation. But I think this shows a gap in thinking.

One of the goals of managing blade servers is managing each chassis or rack as a system, instead of managing each blade individually like a rack of 1U servers. This type of management is a complex task. Managing blade servers as a system requires managing multiple operating system instances and their associated resources. These are also the same requirements that virtual machine companies have for the management of virtual machines.

The companies that must accomplish this are not the blade server vendors; the blade server vendors will survive if they provide system management tools or not. The companies that must accomplish this are the virtual machine vendors. The VM vendors, by the definition of their business, manage multiple instances of operating systems with some resources being shared between the instances. If the VM vendors do not provide systems management for VMs, their business will fail.

The companies who’s business are dependent upon effectively managing multiple instances of operating systems and their associated shared resources are the companies that must succeed or die trying. Those companies are the VM companies.