Virtualisation management firm VMTurbo has updated its Operations Manager tool with broader platform support and enhancements to its policy engine.

Available immediately, VMTurbo Operations Manager 3.3 broadens its virtualisation platform support to include VMware’s vCloud 5.1 and Microsoft’s Hyper-V 2012, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation 3.1, as well as adding CloudStack and Citrix XenServer.

The new version also enhances the usability of the system, giving customers greater visibility of information about their virtual machines and also more flexible control over the timing of any changes the suite recommends.

VMTurbo itself is a relatively new firm, founded with the aim of simplifying the operation of complex virtualised datacentres. Operations Manager takes a radical approach to this, automating as many management tasks as possible and using techniques borrowed from economics to balance resources against demand.

“We call it the Economic Scheduling Engine, as it models the IT environment as buyers and sellers, using supply and demand to drive resource allocation decisions,” VMTurbo’s managing director for Northern Europe, Andrew Mallaband, told V3.

Under this model, applications sell transactions to the business while buying memory, CPU and disk resources from virtual machines, using virtual pricing which varies as resource utilisation fluctuates throughout the datacentre, just like a market-driven ecosystem.

Version 3.3 aims to improve the usability of Operations Manager for service providers and enterprise customers alike by allowing for more customisation, according to Mallaband.

“We deal with lots of enterprises and cloud service providers who are keen to expose information from our system and some of the control functions to their customers,” he said.