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Use of these virtual servers provides a variety benefits - including reduced capital spending on hardware, reduced demands on power and cooling capacity, and more flexible allocation of processing capacity.

The introduction of virtualisation, however, creates many new management challenges for IT organisations. These new challenges arise from two basic causes:

1. Virtual servers by their very nature must be managed differently from physical servers - especially given the current limitations of VMware's tools.

2. Data centres are only partially virtualised. That is, servers may be physical machines or they may be virtual machines residing on physical machines with other virtual servers.This mix of virtual and physical servers adds a new level of complexity to management operations. As a result, IT organisations must re-think the way they manage their increasingly dynamic mix of virtual and physical servers. This article discusses tools and approaches that can be used to both overcome the limitations of VMware's tools and also to manage the complexity within a partially virtualised data centre, concluding that these approaches will also enable virtualisation to be more broadly deployed.