Egenera has gone to market with its promised vBlade software, the extension to its PAN Manager that provides a single environment for configuring, allocating, repurposing and managing both physical servers and virtual machines.

This initial implementation uses XenEnterprise, a virtualization solution from XenSource based on the open source Xen hypervisor. Egenera intends to put other hypervisors in PAN for future vBlade implementations.

VBlades, which are priced as an add-on, are user-defined partitions of a physical blade to consolidate multiple VMs on a single physical server. Pan can figure out whether an application needs a whole blade or just part of one. It saves the user from having to add another domain expert to the IT organization.

VMs on Egenera's BladeFrame systems can access N+1 failover, N+1 disaster recovery, resource pools, blade farms, suspend/resume, live migrations and security.

Egenera says virtual machines add management complexity especially when a lot of them are used. They need tools that are sophisticated and understand dependencies.