Reading the buzz coming from VMWorld in Vegas toay, it’s clear that VMWare is finally embracing management tools. This has been an interesting road for the company, and I believe Microsoft is forcing their hand — something CEO Paul Maritz is painfully aware of.

A major problem with virtual machines is sprawl. They’re so easy to create, anyone can do it. And they do — leaving hundreds of orphaned virtual machines and thousands of license dollars in VMWare’s pockets. David Lynch of Embotics alluded to this when I spoke with him last week. Why would a company that sells licenses want to help people manage that sprawl?

The short answer is Microsoft. If you’re building a cloud, you’re going to use something that’s free and open for you to hack around with. In other words, Xen. And if you’re an enterprise, you’re going to use a VM that includes machine, OS, and application licensing. In other words, triple-threat Microsoft.

One of the first things Maritz did was to make some of the VMWare catalog free. And with Microsoft’s Systems Center Virtual Machine Manager looming on the horizon, VMWare is now introducing management plans.

It will be interesting times for VM management companies, reminiscent of the days when desktop vendors started adding functions like painting, audio recorders, remote desktops and disk compression to their OSes, leaving vendors competing against the platform they ran on. We had two cloud/VM management companies pull out of a panel at Interop at the last minute, for very different reasons. I wonder if we’ll hear about either of them again in this light.