1. Apparatus for managing, from a central location, a storage virtualization engine consisting of a plurality of volume managers, each volume manager having a local memory, running on one of a plurality of networked nodes and managing storage located at that node, the apparatus comprising: management software at the central location that sends a command to one of the plurality of nodes to cause a volume manager located at that node to perform a desired operation on storage located at that node; and management software that is responsive to the command for sending additional commands to nodes other than the one node in order to synchronize information in the local memory of each volume manager so that the storage located at all of the nodes appears to be a single virtual storage pool.