VMware announced the availability of VMware Lifecycle Manager. The product provides control over the virtual environment, showing who owns a virtual machine, when it was requested, who approved it, where it is deployed, how long it has been in operation and when it is scheduled to be decommissioned. VMware Lifecycle Manager also gives IT managers the ability to measure and chargeback the use of virtual machines to individual department owners. The automation and control of the entire virtual machine lifecycle eliminates manual and repetitive tasks that often introduce errors, and it also enables the business to be in strict compliance with IT policies and standards.

VMware virtual machines encapsulate applications and operating systems in portable and manageable "containers" that improve the security, availability and performance of both the application and the operating system. The portability and manageability characteristics of virtual machines makes them suited for capturing and automating IT processes such as service delivery. As companies standardize on VMware Infrastructure and deploy virtual machines as a way to run applications, secure data, assure business continuity and reduce energy consumption, they need efficient tools to help manage virtual machine proliferation. VMware Lifecycle Manager allows companies to implement a consistent and automated process for requesting, approving, deploying, updating, and retiring virtual machines.

"VMware Lifecycle Manager allows customers to fully automate the provisioning, charging back and decommissioning of virtual machines," said Raghu Raghuram, vice president of products and solutions at VMware. "VMware Lifecycle Manager is integral to the many new products VMware is bringing to market to offer unprecedented levels of automation and control across datacenters."

With VMware Lifecycle Manager, customers can:

• Create a catalog of standard IT services
• Streamline requests and approvals
• Track and control virtual machines
• Eliminate manual, repetitive, and error-prone tasks
• Assign Chargeback Metrics
• Integrate with existing management tools

"A recent ESG survey of current and planned virtual server adopters, showed that current users expect that the number of their virtual machines will grow by 173% over the next two years," said Mark Bowker, industry analyst at ESG. "To handle this massive growth, VMware Lifecycle Manager delivers IT organizations a method to automate best practices by implementing a standardized approach for managing user requests for the provisioning of virtual machines, while simultaneously eliminating manual and repetitive tasks."