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Virtual
virtualization
right
for matters for
Infrastructure
maintaining strong
relationships
with business unit
Management leaders.
T
here are two sides to virtualization. and policies as virtualized applications migrate
The positives are well known: better across devices; and efficiently report avail-
hardware utilization, faster application ability, performance and response times as
deployment and increased workload dictated by service level agreements.
mobility, all in the service of business agility. It’s critical to get the management formula
But any enterprise eager to exploit these advan- right, because the last thing IT leaders want
tages also needs to prepare for virtualization’s to do is disrupt end users’ computing experi- >> About the author:
other side: the IT management challenges that ence — especially considering that virtualization Jennifer Zaino
accompany the more dynamic, flexible and is very much about optimizing that experience writes about the
business applica-
application-centric infrastructure enabled by and accelerating application delivery to support tions of IT. She is
virtualization technology. key business goals and strategies. Yet, the very a regular contri-
Virtualization requires a paradigm shift from flexibility that virtualization enables can lead butor to TechWeb
traditional IT management models. Because to outages if network connections don’t travel and former exec-
applications are no longer tied only to physical along with VMs, or if they create unexpected utive editor of InformationWeek and
Network Computing.
ports, IT organizations must have visibility demands on physical resources for which IT
into — and be able to manage down to — the may be unprepared, thereby causing degrada-
virtual port, machine and operating system tions in user performance. “The network, if not
level. This is critical, because end-user expec- managed in conjunction with the VM environ-
tations remain high as IT departments run ment, can actually act as a bottleneck, because
multiple virtual machines (VMs) on a single networks and data centers were designed more
compute node. As a result, IT leaders must con- for static and physical devices, not mobile
tinue to support end-to-end quality of service virtual devices,” says Yankee Group senior vice
(QoS); ensure the persistence of connections president Zeus Kerravala.
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Best Practices SERIES / virtualization
Implementing an open network infra- networking infrastructure, and being able Ethernet and storage switches. By using
structure that addresses management to act on that insight, are equally impor- Virtual Access Layer (VAL) technology that is
requirements, both through built-in capa- tant to application performance in these consistently deployed across Ethernet, Fibre
bilities and coordination with existing dynamic environments. Channel and converged networking solutions,
management toolsets, helps IT avoid Federating the administration of the IT leaders can gain virtual machine-aware
these problems. In addition, it sets the distributed virtual switching that occurs and policy-aware edge-networking capabili-
stage for realizing the full benefits of vir- within servers, as well as the network- ties, as well as unified physical and virtual
tualization. Many enterprises still aren’t ing that occurs on the LAN and storage port services.
scaling virtualization technology to very side, is important to application-aware In addition, Server Application Optimi-
large environments because of concerns networking in many other respects. It zation (SAO) technology makes it possible
over virtual application sprawl without vis- provides the foundation for automat- for IT to extend QoS and other advanced
ibility into network, computing and storage ing communication and migration of networking capabilities within a Brocade
resources — and maintaining the associ- the network policies and configurations fabric out to virtual server environments
ated QoS and other service levels. This associated with applications — regard- and virtual ports. The end result is that
lack of insight makes it impossible for IT less of how those applications are IT leaders now can maintain QoS and
to guarantee the performance needed for deployed and redeployed across the vir- guaranteed performance levels for mis-
those applications to run seamlessly. tual infrastructure. sion-critical applications down to the
However, there’s great potential for Such a unified, smar t, end-to-end virtual machine level, thereby gaining
IT leaders who invest in open, virtual, networking infrastructure contributes to back the control they were accustomed to
application-savvy network infra-
structures to deliver innovations,
such as enterprise clouds, to the
business. For instance, instead of
relying on cloud resources from CIOs must prepare
managed ser vices providers, IT
leaders can exploit internal open-
for t he IT management challenges that
network infrastructure to instantly accompany dynamic, flexible,
provision assets in virtual data
centers to meet a wide range of
application-centric infrastructures.
business needs.
To avoid common pitfalls and
realize the promise of virtualization, IT greater scalability in the virtual data cen- having in the “one-application-to-one
leaders should consider the following: ter, as it enables VMs to move to faster server” world. As another example of tech-
computing nodes while transparently nology leadership in this area, Brocade
Virtual infrastructure management retaining their relevant connections, policy Data Center Fabric Manager (DCFM) pro-
requires intelligent networks. requirements and performance character- vides visibility at the virtual machine level
In the age of virtualization, networks require istics. As a result, access control lists, to enable fabricwide, application service-
greater intelligence with advanced function- virtual LAN (VLAN) identities, and encryp- level monitoring and management that
ality to unify and automate the networking tion policies that might once have been automatically reacts to changes in virtual
services that collectively exist in servers, associated with a particular physical port server workloads.
the fabric and storage. Doing so opens the will be able to follow the VM seamlessly These capabilities play a critical tech-
door to holistically assigning the spectrum throughout the virtual environment. nology role and equally help IT leaders
of resources to applications for a more Brocade® understands such require- maintain strong relationships with their
reliable and agile computing experience. ments and is enabling advanced and business unit peers. Business heads,
After all, as virtual deployments expand, automated network ser vices through after all, expect to receive the same high
IT leaders must consider more than just embedded network capabilities, as well performance they were used to when they
server resources when determining where as a common management utility that “owned” the servers that ran their orga-
to place an application or when to move it. spans ser ver connectivity products, nizations’ critical applications. If their
Gaining insight into the health of the entire adapter s for LANs and SANs, and business units must share resources with
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Best Practices SERIES / virtualization
other divisions, they want to be confident Indeed, this may be one way to solve the taking place at the compute layer. But for
that their requirements don’t suffer in the complexity problem, but it hardly seems the long term, he thinks such a solution
process of technology change. a realistic solution to these challenges — limits enterprise choice and flexibility
especially considering that it can lock IT around computing platforms, network
Virtual infrastructure management leaders into proprietary virtual switching infrastructure and storage.
requires open platforms. technology and force them to toss out The whole point of virtualization is to
As IT leaders look to implement virtual existing software assets. Moreover, most respond to business changes more quickly
application-aware networking across SANs modern data center environments tend and to deploy services anywhere at any
and LANs, they hope to avoid a rip-and- to be characterized by multiple hypervi- time, Kerravala says. IT leaders who build
replace scenario as it relates to their sors, management tools, servers, storage their infrastructures on products that aren’t
existing infrastructure toolsets, both to and networks from a variety of vendors. IT open and standards based may find that
they’re not able to respond
quickly enough. Both open-
ness and adherence to
1.
those orchestration tools. service administration and orchestration
Bring intelligence to the
This open approach differs significantly tools. This might include major revisions to network to unify and automate
from other virtual infrastructure manage- rework any customized applications built on the networking services that
ment philosophies. Some, for example, top of existing business services suites. collectively exist in servers,
would argue that the complexity of manag- Ripping and replacing technology isn’t the fabric and storage,
ing VMs requires a vertically integrated going to work, says Kerravala of the move
solution incorporating a narrow subset
of available technologies. Such a sys-
to network-enabled computing. “Open is
the key here.” Very vertically integrated 2. Take an open platform
approach to deliver network
infrastructure as a service,
tem would bundle together a hypervisor, and tightly coupled solutions may have
networking switches, adapters, storage,
an orchestration framework and even an
entirely new server from a single vendor. It’s
some short-term advantages, he says,
now that computing infrastructures are
highly dependent on events happening at
3. Access expertise to help
scale virtualization throughout
the data center.
not surprising that any such set of capabili- the network level. And the network simi-
ties is likely to come at a premium price. larly must be very responsive to what’s
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Best Practices SERIES / virtualization
management view into the health of a SAN, errors, with disastrous consequences. IT provided their specific network, server and
information that gets reported back to the staff may not have accounted for the pos- storage technology. In addition to helping
Microsoft System Center, so that the latter sibility, for example, that the VM would organizations create reliable and scalable
can make decisions about moving virtual automatically migrate to a new node that virtual infrastructures, Brocade also provides
services such as continuous
monitoring of these environ-
ments to ensure that network
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