As an individual representing a vendor that has traditionally viewed IT through the network lens, attending VMworld last week I sometimes felt a bit like a Trekkie at a sports bar. Not entirely unwelcome, but not exactly the crowd I usually run with, either.
While virtualization initiatives seem to be securely in the hands of the server and data center teams in most IT organizations, we are certainly seeing an uptick in the involvement and burden of the network team.
A year ago, a common virtualization discussion between server admin and a network engineer might have sounded like this:
Server admin: “We’re provisioning a new rack of blades and VMs so I need some cables and IP addresses.”
Network engineer: “Well how are you going to configure the VLANs for that?”
Server admin: “Don’t worry about it. This is a big cost saving initiative. I’ll just configure the vswitch myself.”
While this type of thing still happens, our customers tell us that the network teams are increasingly being brought into the dialogue as enterprises move beyond virtualizing the low hanging fruit—e.g., file and print services, anti-virus detection, Exchange, Web platforms, etc. Aggressive virtualization initiatives with goals that sound like “70% virtualized by the end of the year” require more middle-tier “business” apps and complex components to become virtualized and the best practices and visibility expected in the physical world have to translate to the virtual realm.
This was evident at the VMworld vendor exhibition where “monitoring” and “visibility” messaging was present at vendor booths large and small. NetQoS even had a chance to present in the Cisco booth where a mixed audience of server and network pros all found value in understanding what data collection and analytics from application response time, Netflow and device statistics could do to get a handle on the hybrid infrastructure most of us are dealing with.
There was a lot of innovative and compelling virtualization management technology there at the show, but approaches that support only virtualized environments or only a subset of applications are not going to be adequate. This story has played out in numerous technology waves dating back to the client/server era (and probably even before). You need to get visibility and control in the new realm but that doesn’t mean the old one goes away completely.
While higher levels of server virtualization are bringing the importance of the network perspective to the forefront, desktop virtualization will make network performance even more critical. We chatted with a bunch of vendors like Wanova that are trying to make the location of the virtualized desktop irrelevant, permitting more desktops to become virtualized even amidst mobility and roaming end users.
But keeping remote users secure and up-to-date is not the same as assuring performance of mission critical apps in real time. You need to understand the performance of the various virtualization scenarios—server and desktop, dedicated resource pools, Vmotion—and the best way to do that is to understand what acceptable performance is in the physical realm and know where latency exists. With that knowledge, you can track the performance and behavioral changes when you virtualize the infrastructure and endpoints.
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