Microsoft hopes to play alongside Sun, HP and others in developing "virtual datacenter" software that will make it easier to manage applications running across groups of servers, a company executive said Wednesday.

"It's a problem that we're pretty excited about solving, and there are lots of things we're doing to tackle it across the company," said Bill Veghte, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Windows server group, in a presentation at the company's Silicon Valley campus Wednesday.

"Think of it not only in the context of what Windows Server can do on the deployment and operation and policy side, but think about how applications are written and how server applications such as Exchange and SQL Server can take advantage of (virtualization)," he said.

Veghte made the comments at the end of a presentation about Microsoft's upcoming Windows Server 2003 software, which is due for release April 24.

Without providing a timeframe or much detail about the datacenter software under development, he said the company will provide a "system definition model" that will reduce the time it takes to develop applications for the datacenter. It will also provide "resource virtualization and partitioning" software that will help businesses make more efficient use of their hardware.

Sun and HP already have outlined plans to offer software and hardware for building a virtual datacenter, and have rolled out some initial components. The idea basically is to let administrators manage a large group of servers and other hardware as if it were a single large machine. Another goal is to make better use of hardware resources and make it easier to deploy and manage applications on those systems.

Veghte said more work can be done during the development stage of software to provide capabilities that make it easier to manage applications in such an environment.

"Instead of management being an afterthought, which is the problem we have in the industry today, where you've got vendors providing solutions that aren't really bolted into the platform, we have to invert that. We have to bolt it into the platform so that we can consume this schema, or this definition from applications, and then expose it for innovative third-party tools. If we can do that then you have the operational automation that is necessary to get away from the complexity in a datacenter today," he said.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.