Ramin Sayar, a vice president at VMware, made it sound like vCenter Operations is something with which everyone will need to be familiar.  Or that the trend that prompted its creation deserves everyone’s attention, at least.

Sayar explained in an statement, “IT management is being turned on its head as enterprises expand their virtual infrastructures to achieve improved efficiencies and responsiveness.  Increasingly, our customers are realizing that a management model designed for yesterday’s IT systems is making it difficult to keep up with the demands of today’s business environment.”

Sayar then continued, “We believe VMware vCenter Operations will help our customers modernize their operations and take the next step in the journey toward a more simplified, agile approach to IT.”

The main goals associated with vCenter Operations are ensuring service levels in dynamic cloud environments and getting to the root cause of performance problems.  It’s designed to allow the real-time optimization of deployments for the sake of self-service provisioning, as well, and maintain compliance regardless of changes.

Otherwise, the official statement promised, “vCenter Operations is designed as a set of products and solutions that will bring together the performance, capacity and configuration management capabilities VMware has developed and acquired, including VMware vCenter CapacityIQ, VMware vCenter Configuration Manager and Integrien Alive.”

Now let’s address the matters of availability and pricing, since those are always big factors in whether something’s adopted.  An edition of vCenter Operations designated vCenter Operations Standard should be released later this month, with prices starting at a rate of $50 per VM.

Later, versions known as vCenter Operations Advanced and vCenter Operations Enterprise will also roll out, although dates and prices remain unknown there.

Hopefully these solutions will prove useful to IT managers.  If not, at least VMware’s warning may serve some purpose in terms of letting everyone know how fast the industry’s changing.

A key advantage of these webinars, which will be hosted by Enterprise Management Associates: they’re free.  So no one has to worry about accessing a PayPal account or pulling out a credit card to fork over $50, never mind making the plane and hotel reservations required as part of attending a real conference.

Then, depending on the openness of your schedule, one additional nice thing about the webinars is that they will all be held rather soon.  No waiting, in other words.

The first one will actually take place later today (depending on when you read this).  It’s scheduled for 2 PM EST, is titled “WAN Optimization Radar Report: Taking Charge of Traffic,” and will be led by EMA Managing Research Director Jim Frey and EMA Senior Analyst Tracy Corbo.

Next, EMA VP of Research Dennis Drogseth will lead a session titled “Service-Centric Asset Management in the Age of Cloud Computing” on March 8th starting at 2 PM EST.  Another session (called “Single Sign-On for the Cloud and Beyond: How Comprehensive Is Your Strategy?”) is scheduled for March 10th, and a fourth one (titled End User Experience Monitoring: Ten Key Product Differentiators to Understand Before You Buy”) is due to take place on March 24th.

Finally, on March 31st, there’ll be one last session by the name of “IT as a ‘Secret Weapon’: Growing the Business with Proactive Application Performance Management.”

Hopefully these webinars will prove useful to the average IT management professional.  If not, at least there’s nothing to prevent anyone who gets bored from just closing the window and going back to work.

The one potential inconvenience we’ll mention is that would-be participants will have to sign up for both a free EMA account and individual webinars.

An official announcement put the spotlight on the paid version, stating, “The new, premium features in SherpaTools help enterprises protect and preserve end user data. Google Apps admins can now delegate access to fellow IT staff, such as help desk workers, without providing the company’s master username and password credentials.”

The announcement also noted, “An equally valuable new, premium feature in SherpaTools involves the ability to quickly and easily preserve the data assets of terminated employees. . . .  With SherpaTools, IT admins can automatically delegate all of a terminated employee’s files to his or her manager or another user in the system.  This saves time and helps to ensure that important data is not lost.”

Still, users of the free version will still get access to Directory Manager, Directory Bot, and other modules as Cloud Sherpas develops them.

All together, then, this represents a very attractive opportunity for IT managers to enhance Google Apps, which is itself becoming more popular every month.

Ed Ceaser and Nick Kallen, two engineers at Twitter, constructed a sort of essay titled “The Anatomy of a Whale.”  In it, they discussed diagnosing and correcting a problem that cropped up a few weeks ago.

We’ll only try to describe the broad strokes here (the full post is 2,000 words long), but Ceaser and Kallen stated, “[W]e used a simple strategy that involves proceeding from the most aggregate measures of system as a whole and at each step getting more fine grained, looking at smaller and smaller parts.”

Then, with some rough spots and quirks identified, they focused on the biggest contributor to the problem, and made the software that talks to Memcached more efficient with its requests, eliminating almost half of Memcached calls.

Hopefully Ceaser’s and Kallen’s walkthrough will prove helpful, or at least interesting.  It’s not every day that big companies allow outsiders to have a look at how they handle difficulties.

This partnership is something that’s supposed to affect lots of companies and people, not just gigantic corporations and scientists who work on the cutting edge.  Also, it’s important to note that this three-year deal is supposed to affect things in the near future, and not a decade or more down the road.

So now for the meat of the matter: as explained in an official blog post, Microsoft and HP intend to “to help customers and partners substantially improve the customer experience for developing, deploying and managing today’s IT environments, and building next generation cloud applications.”

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, also said in a statement, “Our extended partnership will transform the way large enterprises deliver services to their customers, and help smaller organizations adopt IT to grow their businesses.”

People in the IT industry need to consider how they should adapt to a future with cloud computing.  An investment of $250 million is liable to bring that future here faster than anticipated.

As reported by Ryan Paul, “Sun cofounder and former CEO Scott McNealy says that the Obama administration has asked him to prepare a paper that will address this topic and provide guidance on potential open source adoption strategies.”

If open source software is accepted as good enough for the more-than-ginormous government, people at companies of every size will start to ask questions, and IT professionals should prepare to discuss the subject with their bosses. Folks who like open source software can perhaps get a step ahead by broaching the subject themselves; people who don’t will want to get their list of “cons” ready.

There isn’t any need to get too ahead of the game, though, as this is the government we’re talking about and decisions will probably take a while to get made.

For whatever it’s worth, we’ll note that there’s at least one other way to approach this development, too – IT professionals in some of the shakier private sectors should think about shopping around for a nice government job.