CIO — Long ago, when servers still came one to a box, "sysadmins" spent all their time running from one machine to another, with boxes of tools and utilities designed to squeeze out every bit of performance and stability from physical servers.

Now, virtual servers outnumber the physical in most data centers. And neither budgets nor toolboxes are over-provisioned with resources for fine-tuning virtual infrastructures.

Companies expanding beyond the pilot phase and moving into large-scale server or desktop virtualization need to realize that utilities from third parties—not just the platform vendors—are what will help them make virtual infrastructures as stable as the real ones, some analysts say.

"One of the most common misconceptions among the non-technologist crowd is that once you buy your virtualization platform, you are done with your software purchases," warns Greg Shields, who writes extensively in books and blogs on the details of virtual-infrastructure implementations and serves as partner and principal technologist at Concentratedtech.com.

"When you virtualize an environment you add in dependencies no single human can do a truly good job of understanding," Shields says. "On a physical server a network problem is probably related to the card. On a virtual server, the card is virtual, so the problem could be it's not getting enough processor power, or the storage performance. You need very broad-based tools that will address those metrics."

The fight between Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) and Dell (DELL) to acquire virtual-storage optimization vendor 3Par shows how important management and optimization products are in keeping virtualized infrastructures running, according to Chris Wolf, senior analyst at Burton Group.

"This year especially we saw a lot of big organizations virtualizing serious enterprise applications," Wolf says. "When you have mission-critical apps virtualized or in the cloud, diagnosing application problems and optimizing performance in the virtual environment becomes very important."

It's impossible to say which utilities or ISVs offer the best tool for every environment, Shields says. But five specific types are particularly important to getting virtual infrastructures humming right now.

1. Capacity Management

"Virtualization is taking what became sort of an also-ran activity, capacity management, and showing why it's really a critical step," Shields says.

Multi-processor, muti-core servers and acres of RAM made planning for server capacity almost moot, Shields says. With virtual servers, however, the question isn't the power of the server, it's how that capacity is doled out to specific workloads on specific virtual machines, and monitoring the performance of the VMs to make sure all the resource demands are satisfied.

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