While virtualization can simplify life in many aspects, including disaster recovery, panelists said it introduces many new complications. With virtualization “there are two layers of infrastructure,” said Dave Malcolm, CTO of . “You have to be able to keep track of the virtual machines’ relationships to physical infrastructure.” Maintaining performance through these layers of abstraction is another issue.

“If virtualization wasn’t hard to manage or [didn't] have its own complexities, we wouldn’t be in business,” Litkey said. “In many respects, we’re still learning as we go. Companies are still running into new challenges.”

The four vendors on the panel make tools that integrate with VMware and other hypervisors, automating the management of virtual machines and enabling features such as self-provisioning, automatic discovery of rogue VMs, and visibility into usage and capacity.

If you have a small virtualization deployment, a spreadsheet might be a sufficient tool for keeping track and managing virtual machines. But once the deployment grows large enough, a third-party management tool may be necessary, panelists said.

“When you’re over 100 VMs, you probably ought to be looking at an automation solution,” Malcolm said.