Management appliance maker Kace Monday announced it has equipped its KBOX devices with capabilities to both manage and provision virtual machines.

Kace says the virtual capabilities will help IT managers reduce the number of management tools they need to monitor and provision heterogeneous environments. For systems management, KBOX 1000 appliances will now be able to monitor the availability and performance of all servers. For provisioning, KBOX 2000 appliances can perform agent-less deployment of physical and virtual machines from a centralized library, the company says.

CTO and co-founder Marty Kacin explains that Kace also enabled a new technology on the appliances that will help network managers reprovision or reconfigure virtual machines based on a standard system image. Dubbed vState Management, the technology allows machines to be rapidly reprovisioned without sending new images across the network.

"The technology makes it possible to compare the current configuration with the predefined standard image and only send the changes to the virtual system over the network," Kacin says.

Like management software competitors BMC, Hyperic and Netuitive, Kace is adding the support for virtual environments in response to customer demand. Kacin says his company's technology is able to look into virtual machines at the file level and reconcile changes, resulting in less strain on network resources. "By doing this, we are able to reduce network traffic and the storage needed for those instances," he says.

The virtual management capabilities will be included as a standard upgrade and are expected to be available in September. For new customers, pricing for KBOX 1000 Systems Management Series Appliances starts at US$9,500 (AU$11,506) for 100 nodes, and pricing for KBOX 2000 Series Systems Deployment Appliances starts at about US$13,000 for 100 nodes.