EMC has launched four new products to help customers manage infrastructures that contain both physical and virtual machines.

The offerings were unveiled at VMware's annual customer and partner conference, VMworld 2008.

To help customers identify changes in their infrastructure, and to allow them to plan for necessary improvements, EMC has integrated its Infra service management and service desk solution with the Smarts EMC Application Discovery Manager.

This will bring Information Technology Infrastructure Library processes to the virtual environment, said the firm, and allow VMware discovery and virtual dependency mapping.

EMC also released Application Discovery Manager 6 to help customers map virtual machines to their physical infrastructure.

"This should increase customers' confidence in meeting service level agreements," said Bob Quillan, EMC's senior director of product development.

Quillan added that EMC's Smarts technology would be extended to virtual environments so that customers would be made aware when their virtual server goes down.

He also announced ControlCenter 6.1, which will deliver increased visibility across VMware and thin-provisioned storage environments. It offers support for EMC's Symmetrix DMX4 and Symmetrix DMX3 enterprise thin provisioning products.

The EMC announcement followed the results of a new survey conducted by the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).

"Virtualisation breaks down the silos we see in IT but then we are left with two more silos to overcome: the physical and the virtual," said Mark Bowker, an analyst with ESG.

The survey found that IT managers believe their biggest difficulty is how to isolate root cause problems within server environments. It polled 150 IT professionals and only 24 per cent said they were confident with their current management tool's ability to maintain existing IT service levels.

EMC's new infrastructure management products are designed to increase the visibility of customer's virtualised environments, said Quillan.

He added that the solutions will currently work only with VMware technology, but that there are plans to support other technologies in the next couple of years.