I work with a group that does integration testing for a IP/IPv6 network stack. We have many stress testing workloads that we run across a variety of platforms, including Linux (RHEL and SuSE), Windows (XP-2008), and a number of versions of AIX.
As of right now, our method for starting workloads across platforms involves us kicking off a dozen or more jobs manually across our test systems, however we're getting to the point where this is no longer feasible.
What sort of solutions exist for starting/stopping/querying workloads across multiple platforms and managing them at some higher level?