IT management software provider SolarWinds has today announced its new Virtualisation Manager (formerly Hyper9) and Storage Manager (powered by Profiler). Both products are aimed at helping the IT community master virtualisation, including managing the server virtualisation layer and optimizing storage performance and capacity for virtualisation.

SolarWinds predicts businesses of all sizes will progress through three phases of maturity as environments are virtually scaled to lay the foundation for a cloud strategy. According to the company, the three phases of virtualisation maturity comprise:

• Assuring availability: Represents the majority of organisations with up to 30 percent of their environment virtualised. In this stage, users need help identifying how many VMs are available and which ones are using which physical storage resources?
• Optimising performance: Phase two is commonly comprised of a more experienced set of virtualisation admins who have virtualised up to 70 percent of their environment. Businesses working through this phase are asking what happens if more hosts or VMs are added and when they can expect to run out of physical storage.
• Transforming the Environment: The third phase includes businesses that are 80+ percent virtualised and have a solid foundation to implement and manage a cloud strategy. This phase of users need help answering which departments are using which resources and what the readiness for chargeback is.

"Managing shared resources in virtualised and cloud environments—from storage to memory to CPU—can be a bit like managing in the dark," said Suku Krishnaraj, SolarWinds' senior vice president of product strategy. "Virtualization Manager and Storage Manager provide users with an easy to use, cost-effective approach that understands the complexity and dynamics of the underlying relationships and dependencies needed for both large and small environments."