Hydrasight observes a growing number of enterprise vendors promoting and providing hypervisor technologies, including Microsoft and VMware plus Citrix/XenSource, Oracle and Sun among others. We believe this will result in the increased requirement for heterogeneous hypervisor management, and the potential justification for further investments in IT management software. For the majority of IT organisations however, we predict that the benefits of an infrastructure management ‘suite' that includes heterogeneous hypervisor management are unlikely to justify the required investment before 2011.

While Hydrasight continues to believe that VMware will maintain an unassailable position in server hardware virtualisation for the foreseeable future (refer "HYDRASIGHTS 2008: Server virtualisation"), we predict that multiple hypervisor technologies will increasingly be implemented within enterprises. The key driver for this will be the ‘affinity' of particular hypervisors in particular scenarios. Namely:

• Alignment to hardware vendor (e.g., Sun, IBM)
• Alignment to operating system provider (e.g., Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat)
• Alignment to application vendor (e.g., Oracle)

Hydrasight expects the general conditions and behaviours of enterprise IT to inevitably result in a mixed (hypervisor) environment—as it has with the introduction and adoption of most other technologies. Key contributing factors include varying business unit technology strategies plus ongoing merger and acquisition activity within both organisations and vendors alike.

We believe that key initial requirements for heterogeneous hypervisor management (HHM) will be the ability to ‘migrate' or ‘relocate' virtual machines onto different physical systems plus resilience, discovery/rediscovery and topology mapping. Other initial requirements will be extensions of current needs (e.g., monitoring, provisioning, security and automation). Moving forward, Hydrasight foresees that these requirements will grow to include automated change/configuration management and, ultimately, chargeback.

An unavoidable outcome from the inevitability of multiple hypervisor technologies within enterprise-scale IT environments is a greater rationale for ongoing investment with traditional IT management vendors - e.g., BMC, CA, EMC, HP, IBM and Symantec Corp. We believe that the benefit of being the major incumbent(s), along with ongoing inertia toward migrating IT management environments, which is due to a variety of factors including integration complexity (refer "Peeling back the management integration 'onion'"), will ultimately place the major IT management vendors in a strong position beyond 2011. Hydrasight foresees however that, before 2011, such vendors will continue to lag more-agile IT management ‘start-ups' (e.g., CiRBA, Novell/PlateSpin, Scalent, Surgient).

By 2009/10, as initial requirements for HHM become increasingly commonplace, we believe larger IT management vendors will begin to aggressively acquire smaller HHM vendors in order to fill holes in their portfolio. We therefore advise IT organisations to ensure that investments in HHM functionality are considered tactical, over the medium term (i.e., through 2011), and aligned to/integrated with strategic IT management vendors wherever possible.