Datacentre management software specialist BladeLogic has this week announced the availability of a new suite for managing both physical and virtual servers.

The company said BladeLogic Virtualisation Manager, which is available as a module in its Operations Manager suite of datacentre automation tools, offers out-the-box support for VMware ESX virtual machines and provides datacentre managers with a single interface and unified policy functionality for physical and virtual machines.

It added that the suite also featured a wide range of datacentre management functionality for automatically browsing, provisioning, patching, auditing, remediating and administering virtual servers.

Vance Loiselle, vice president of marketing at BladeLogic, said that new access management functionality for virtual machines, which allows managers to determine which administrators can work on which machines, would also help encourage wider adoption of virtualisation technologies.

"Virtualisation means you don't have to go through the process of installing new servers and can quickly build a new virtual machine, but that can create security and compliance risks," Loiselle said. "The ability to set policies to manage who can access the machines helps reduce those security risks – these types of tools give managers confidence that they can maintain compliance even with a multitude of virtual machines."