Microsoft is building up its management stack to become a larger source of control tools for IT infrastructures. At its IT Forum event in Barcelona the software giant laid out a broad plan that taps virtualisation, scripting, modelling languages and other technologies to help automate helpdesk, deployment, updating, monitoring and other banes of administrators’ lives.

BMC, CA and other management vendors will be challenged by a new Microsoft product, due to appear in about a year’s time. Currently in private beta, the
program is codenamed System Centre Service Desk and will be based on the SML modelling language and configuration management database (CMDB) that tracks
firms’ IT setups regardless of computing platforms.

Windows enterprise management vice-president Kirill Tatarinov, said, “The CMDB is at the heart of enterprise management today and this puts us into the uber-enterprise game.”

PowerShell, Microsoft’s long-awaited command-line shell and scripting tool was launched at the conference.

“Windows has always been behind Unix in terms of scripting ability but now we have something more powerful than any scripting environment on the planet,” said Bob Muglia, senior vice-president of Microsoft’s server and tools business.

For deployment, Microsoft is using technology acquired with the recent purchase of Softricity in a new product called SoftGrid that lets virtualised applications be instantly streamed to users’ desktops.

“You can isolate the application virtually and run local apps side by side without having to install apps on users’ PCs,” said Jeff Wettlaufer, senior technology product manager.

A beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager was released as Microsoft builds up to the launch of Viridan, its virtualisation hypervisor software scheduled to arrive within six months of Longhorn Server.

“Today, firms using virtualisation typically have four to eight VMs but that can go up dramatically,” said Jeff Price, senior director of Windows Server.
“It’s not implausible to have thousands of VMs in a datacentre, so tracking and automating those is key.”

Microsoft also announced the formation of a new group of vendors, the Interop Vendor Alliance (IVA), designed to encourage interoperability efforts between
members including Sun, BEA, CA and Citrix.

Jason Matusow, Microsoft interoperability director, said the IVA was intended to help provide “communication between product teams with interoperability testing, regular events and a blogging engine”.