www.vmware.com

Product: Distributed Resource Scheduler

Developers: The VMware research and development team

Virtualization lets companies more efficiently use their data center hardware. But just as important is better utilization of the human resources that manage those data centers.

To lighten the load, VMware Inc.in Palo Alto, Calif., released its Distributed Resource Scheduler last October as part of its VirtualCenter 3 management software. DRS automatically balances the workload among pools of virtual servers, allowing servers to operate at 80 percent or greater utilization.