3rd party software for virtual machine management

blargoe

I was wondering what folks here were using, if anything, to help you manage your virtual servers. We're in the process of switching some of our production and development servers to MS Virtual Server 2005 R2 and I am not happy with the fact that there isn't a very good way to backup/clone these machines. I'm looking for a package that will help with that and maybe have a cleaner interface to manage our entire infrastructure which now consists of 4 physical servers which will be running 30+ virtual machines.

Thanks in advance for any input

Blargoe

JDMurray

Are you tied to using Virtual PC? VMWare has a nice virtual server management product in VMware Infrastructure 3.

blargoe

I love VMWare, but management is insistent (for now) to stick with Microsoft's product since we fall under a huge SA/EA agreement from our parent company. I know the next service pack for VS2005R2 is supposed to be more functional but it still doesn't have a nice a GUI wrapper as VMWare and some of the other 3rd party add on products that you can pair with Virtual Server.