BMC Software is working to give IT managers the power to provision their internal users with virtual machines, regardless of whether those VMs are hosted on company servers or in the Amazon EC2 cloud.

It's another step toward what observers call the hybrid cloud, or an internal data center working hand-in-glove with an external set of resources in a public cloud. Such a linkage would allow data centers to carry the bulk of a company's computing workload, but rely on a cloud to handle load spikes or non-critical, variable tasks, such as software testing. It may sound like BMC is just climbing aboard a hot button issue, but Herb Van Hook, VP of business planning, said BMC "has been led to the cloud by our customers. We had a joint customer with Amazon who was building out a hybrid cloud."

The customer operates "tens of thousands of servers," many of them virtualized, and it wanted to be able to provision employees with VMs on either its own servers or servers in EC2 -- from the same management console. Van Hook said he could not name the customer at this time but said it was a company that's part of the technology industry.

"They wanted to let their users go direct to Amazon and request resources but do it in a very governed way," he said in an interview.

BMC has been working with Amazon over the past year to incorporate its APIs for basic EC2 service into the operation of BMC's Service Request Management, a tool managing employees' requests for data center services. Other tools include Atrium Orchestrator, a task and process automation system which can automatically fulfill a request for an EC2 virtual machine; BladeLogic Operations Manager, for policy-based server configuration; and Atrium Configuration Management Database, a change management database capturing all specifications of operating systems, applications and virtual machines.

The BladeLogic Operations Manager can see servers, including virtual servers, and enforce compliance policies on them as they operate. The Atrium Configuration Management Database is linked to the other three BMC products and share information with them.

When a business user seeks seven virtual machines in EC2, he goes through his firm's BMC Service Request Management gateway. As the Amazon VMs are created, EC2 gives them unique identifiers, which are downloaded and stored in BMC's Atrium Configuration Management Database, along with their specifications.