Virtualization has remained at the top of IT spending lists this year even as spending on almost every other category has slipped dramatically.

And to help IT organizations get the most out of their virtualization investments, solution providers have an array of new technologies to choose from—including a set of offerings introduced by CA this week, which work in concert with an updated set of security and compliance technologies CA announced last week.

CA has unveiled several new and updated enterprise IT management products to help enterprises and service providers get more value from their virtualized environments, the company has announced.

“Customers have been asking us for support of virtualization,” says Stephen Elliot, a strategy vice president at CA. “There’s a lack of tools that are available, and customers say they don’t want to buy a new set of tools.”

While Gartner has placed virtualized workloads at about 15 percent and are forecasting growth to 50 percent by 2012, CA’s Elliot believes the number may be closer to 20 percent today. And as it grows, solution providers and customers are looking for their tools to help manage these new environments.

Rather, Elliot says, customers are looking for their existing tools to provide the management support they want for VMware and Microsoft virtualization.

CA has introduced CA Spectrum Service Assurance, a new dashboard that displays the impact of the physical and virtual IT infrastructure on the services it supports.

In addition, CA has added virtualization capabilities to the following updated products:

• CA Spectrum Automation Manager r11.7 helps with centralized application configuration management and dynamic resource provisioning across physical, virtual and cloud environments. The new version adds rapid physical-to-virtual (P2V) and virtual-to-virtual (V2V) server provisioning.

• CA eHealth Performance Manager r6.2 monitors data and voice network performance of databases and client/server applications across physical and virtual environments. This new version adds discovery of VMware and other virtual environments.

• CA Insight Database Performance Manager r11.3 monitors performance across DB2 for Linux, Unix and Windows; Oracle; SQL Server and Sybase databases in physical, virtual or cloud environments. The new version adds continuous monitoring of databases in VMware environments, including across hot migrations performed using VMware VMotion without user interaction, as well as enhanced support for VMware performance through proactive monitoring of the VMware vCenter Server repository, according to CA.