Open source management applications have been getting a fair amount of attention over the past few months, and it isn’t just the startups and smaller businesses using them. Even large enterprises are using open source management applications.

Just last week, I blogged about Canonical’s plans for their Landscape Dedicated Server designed to make it easier for companies to manage Ubuntu deployments. In this blog post, I wanted to cover some other recent news from a couple of general purpose open source management applications used to manage diverse environments.

VMware recently announced their acquisition of SpringSource. Hyperic, an open source management solution acquired by SpringSource in May 2009 with a focus on application management for cloud and virtualized environments, is part of this acquisition by VMware. When SpringSource acquired Hyperic, Jay Lyman from The 451 Group said, “The fact that these vendors are joining up in the latest virtualized and cloud environments indicates they have the right offering at the right time, and we expect the combined company will leverage this even more now.” As more companies begin using services in the cloud, VMware will find Hyperic an increasingly important part of their management solution.

Zenoss is another open source management application, and according to Michael Cote from RedMonk, “Zenoss has worked since 2005 to develop an open source IT management stack that excels in monitoring a data center’s infrastructure layer.” They released a new version of their Zenoss Core and Zenoss Enterprise with some new features and improvements in June 2009. According to their press release new features included: Normalization of Metrics Across Heterogeneous Technologies, Scalable Secure, Monitoring of Linux/Unix Servers, Monitoring of Internal or External Web Services, VMware vSphere 4 Support, and more. Lisa Hoover from OStatic calls Zenoss Enterprise “a Swiss Army Knife of assorted monitoring tools. It works across a company’s entire infrastructure to make sure all systems and apps are performing at their peak.”

It isn’t just the vendors talking about open source management tools. On May 26th, Forrester released a study about Open Source IT Management Tools that focuses on their use within enterprises of all sizes. Network World did a pretty good job of covering this report if you want more details, but here’s a quick quote from the Network World article:

Software maturity, support packages and customization capabilities are driving more enterprise and SMB IT organizations to consider open source as a viable alternative to a commercial network management platform, according to Forrester Research.

“With shrinking IT budgets and a continued need to control IT environments, the use of open source solutions to manage infrastructure and operations is no longer just an interesting experience but a viable alternative for enterprises of all sizes,” writes Evelyn Hubbert, senior analyst at Forrester Research in a recent report. “Typically open source solutions are more lightweight and can be a real alternative for managing your IT environment. End users in both midsize and enterprise markets are looking at these tools as a way to save operational expenses.”

There are definitely plenty of choices for managing your IT infrastructure and applications, and the open source solutions are certainly a viable choice, even for large enterprise deployments.

. Read the rest at Intel.com.