Mergers and acquisitions happen often in the high-tech industry, but some stand out more than others either for their huge price tag, their strategic nature or the “game-changing” implications of the deal. VMware’s announcement Tuesday that it entered into an agreement to acquire management software maker Integrien proves the hypervisor vendor wants to make more money with customers by selling them management and automation technology.

Integrien Alive addresses virtual performance
At the opening keynote during VMworld 2010 San Francisco, Stephen Herrod, chief technology officer and senior vice president of R&D at VMware, revealed the hypervisor vendor had entered into agreements to acquire Integrien and separately security vendor TriCipher. Both planned acquisitions seem to address the need to provide management and automation, as well as security for the hybrid cloud environments VMware says it wants to enable.

“We need to innovate in this layer primarily around automation and management. We need to make it cheaper to operate this new infrastructure and automation has to span all of the resources in the data center,” Paul Maritz, president and CEO of VMware, said during the keynote Tuesday, reinforcing the upcoming news. Maritz went on to explain that VMware is talking about delivering “data center management and data center automation.”

Virtualization is an obvious stepping stone to private cloud computing environments, but many IT organizations could encounter obstacles preventing them from evolving their virtual server deployment into a cloud implementation.

In the past, industry watchers warned of virtual machine, or VM, sprawl in which too many virtual instances were deployed without IT management consent or control. VM sprawl could cause IT staff many problems including loss of licenses, unrealized resources, capacity shortages and overworked administrators, trying to keep up with the multiplying VMs. Now the issue has evolved into VM stall, in which many IT organizations are unable to grow their virtual deployments beyond some 30% of servers or the servers that handle the low-hanging fruit in the environment. VM stall can be blamed in part on VM sprawl, as strange as it may seem, according to Andi Mann, vice president of product marketing for the Virtualization and Automation customer solutions unit at CA Technologies (and a former industry analyst at Enterprise Management Associates).

“It’s ironic that VM sprawl can lead directly to VM stall, but it is one of the reasons virtual deployments simply stop progressing,” Mann says. “VM stall happens when IT departments run out of capacity because of poorly managed and controlled VM sprawl or they run out of licenses and the people to manage the environment. Essentially, IT departments run out of options because they can’t deploy more virtual machines.”