VMware unveiled four virtual machine management products at its VMWorld conference in Cannes designed to help manage increasingly complex data centres.

The new applications are built on the company's existing virtualisation platform, and aim to automate labour intensive, error-prone and slow manual tasks.

Virtual machines encapsulate applications and operating systems in standardised, hardware-independent packages that can easily be changed, moved and manipulated.

This means that tedious manual tasks on a physical server can be efficiently automated in a virtual environment.

VMware's new products build on this principle and use virtual machines to automate the steps of the IT service delivery and business continuity processes, eliminating repetitive tasks and minimising errors.

"Automation is the next stage for the virtual data centre," said Raghu Raghuram, vice president of products and solutions at VMware.

"The new products are designed to increase the productivity of IT administrators by preventing virtual machine sprawl and enabling business users to self-provision capacity on demand.

"They will bring unprecedented levels of resiliency to all software applications running in VMware virtual machines."

VMware Lifecycle Manager addresses the needs of infrastructure administrators and allows companies to implement a consistent and automated process for requesting, approving, deploying, updating and retiring virtual machines.

VMware Lab Manager tackles the needs of development and QA engineers and the IT teams that support them by providing fast and simple self-service provisioning of multi-tier virtual machine based environments while enabling IT control over policies.
VMware Stage Manager helps IT and application administrators responsible for rolling new and updated IT services into production by helping to automate the pre-production stages including integration, testing, staging and user acceptance testing.

VMware Site Recovery Manager uses hardware and operating-system independent mobile virtual machines to give IT managers centralised management of recovery plans, automate the recovery process and enable better testing of recovery plans.

"Virtualisation enables IT organisations to automate tasks across traditionally disparate IT silos, such as application development, opening up a whole new world for management in virtualised environments," said Stephen Elliot, research director for enterprise systems management software at IDC.

VMware Lab Manager is available now. VMware Lifecycle Manager, Stage Manager and Site Recovery Manager are expected by the second quarter.