About a year ago a colleague of mine created a demo about using his smart phone to manage virtual center. That’s some innovation, too bad the font size is so small you barely can read what’s on the screen.

Now VMware has something new to really profit from the power of your smart phone. vCenter Mobile Access. When doing a night shift you’ll never have to leave your bed, when you get paged just take your smart phone and restart the VM’s or vmotion some to another host.

It’s going to be released as a virtual appliance in April 2009.

Some of the benefits and a movie (from the VMTN blog post):

Also take a look at http://communities.vmware.com/community/beta/vcmobileaccess

However VMware is not the only one focusing at the mobile user with their management support. Other IT-management tools such as Microsoft’s  SCOM 2007 (Service Center Operations Manager) also offers mobile support out of the box. Use the web interface of SCOM and add “/mobile” to it and you have a simple web interface, not very sophisticated but with some basics it will do.

Besides the vendor specific solutions there are also solutions that support more than one vendor, which can be convenient when you’re not only dealing with a virtualized environment but also with the servers in it (or physical ones if you still run them). One of the suppliers is Rove IT with Mobile Admin 4.2 , currently supporting VMware vCenter, SCOM 2007 and more. For managing VMware with Mobile Admin, Rove makes use of the VMware Perl Administrative API.

Looking at the features that Mobile Admin offers for VMware they have a lot in common with the presented features of VMware’s new Mobile Access.

Mobile Admins features:

• Find VMs
• View VM properties
• Edit VM settings
• View host summaries
• Manage hosts
• and more…