VMware today is unveiling upgrades to several virtualization management products, saying it’s time to automate many of the tasks IT administrators are accustomed to performing manually.

As the VMworld Europe conference begins in Copenhagen, VMware is previewing the next versions of vCenter Operations Management and vFabric Application Management, and releasing the IT Business Management Suite, based on the June acquisition of software-as-a-service vendor Digital Fuel.

vCenter Operations was first released in March, and the upgrade is planned for early 2012 with prices starting at $50 per virtual machine. Four versions have been designed to accommodate everything from small businesses to the largest enterprises. The updated software will feature deeper integration with other VMware products like Capacity IQ and Configuration Manager, which help IT shops oversee virtualization capacity planning and configuration management across virtual and physical servers, workstations and desktops, with the goal of making it easier to optimize the use of resources across the data center. The software will improve awareness of the applications in a virtual environment and how they interact with infrastructure components, making it easier to manage security and disaster recovery needs, VMware says.

With many customers’ virtualization deployments growing in complexity and scale, it’s not unheard of for one administrator to be responsible for 1,000 virtual machines, Rob Smoot, director of product marketing for VMware’s management group, told Ars. VMware has heard from at least one customer that was getting 400 alerts a day from various monitoring tools across physical and virtual infrastructure. Keeping up with all that noise is near impossible, but VMware says its vCenter Operations software uses algorithms to distill the mass of information from VMware tools and third-party software down into key points related to the overall health and efficiency of the system, and potential risk factors.

A dashboard view grades the health of an application, showing memory and CPU utilization, along with anomalies. A risk factor view shows the stress on an application, including the number of clusters, hosts and virtual machines with high stress levels, and an efficiency panel shows density and wasted capacity that can be reclaimed. In some cases, the information is used to provide an alert to IT administrators, and in others the management tool can make changes on its own.

“The direction we’re going in is to increase the automation and reduce the amount of human intervention,” Smoot says. “This will be customizable over time. At this point, it does require some human intervention, and most customers want that intervention until they get comfortable with it.”

The data center isn’t fully automated yet, of course. Smoot notes that the technology and IT’s comfort level with ceding manual tasks to algorithms both have to progress to introduce additional automation. IT shops weren’t always comfortable with the idea of automated workload balancing, yet many customers are now willing to let the machines handle that themselves, he says. High availability features have similarly been moved down into the automation layer, with customers simply pointing and clicking to add HA to a virtualized app, instead of manually configuring a cluster.

The new version of vCenter Operations will make it easier to identify when an application doesn’t have the capacity it needs. Future releases could automate the process of creating more instances of an application server to solve the capacity problem, but that function won’t be automated in this particular release.

“The hooks are basically there and you can semi-automate it, and over time those types of things will become fully automated,” Smoot says. Instead of sending out alerts for low-level problems, the goal is to “have it take care of a lot of those things and only alert IT when a decision needs to be made.”

While VMware has been at the top of the x86 virtualization market for many years, it is facing a major threat from Microsoft’s System Center management tools and Hyper-V, the virtualization platform integrated into Windows Server and the upcoming Windows 8 desktop client. VMware’s value proposition is being better at management of large-scale virtualization projects and cloud networks. With Microsoft in the process of closing much of the VM feature gap, VMware must keep improving its high-level management tools to justify its higher prices.

Further product announcements this week include two new components for the vFabric Application Management Suite, namely an AppDirector to standardize and automate deployment of applications to cloud networks with “templates, component libraries, and deployment workflows,” and an Application Performance Manager to ensure optimal application performance. The software is optimized for the Spring framework for Java and VMware’s vCloud Director software, “but we definitely intend to go beyond that,” Smoot says. Application Performance Manager is scheduled for a Q4 2011 release with prices starting at $360 per VM. AppDirector is expected to be available in early 2012, but we don’t have pricing yet.

Finally, VMware’s IT Business Management Suite will help bring IT and business information together in useful ways with IT Finance Manager, IT Service Level Manager and IT Vendor Manager modules, with the overarching goal of analyzing the cost of delivering IT services. This is essentially a re-branding of the Digital Fuel company VMware acquired in June, and there will be both a SaaS and on-premises version. VMware is integrating the service with VMware software such as its chargeback measurement and analysis tool, but otherwise has made only minor changes, Smoot said. The IT Business Management Suite is targeted for a Q4 2011 release with as-yet-unrevealed per-user pricing.

VMworld Europe runs from today until Thursday. VMware, which is developing a virtualization platform for Android, is rumored to be on the verge of making a mobile announcement with Verizon.