Virtual architecture challenges: Virtual Machine scaling and Virtual Machine security

Virtual architecture management includes the use of automation, monitoring, and management tools to ensure that the hardware and software platforms can run efficiently.

Virtualization technology allows virtual machines to run on any suitable rack-mounted or blade traditional server hardware platform. In the traditional architecture, administrators can easily identify the email server and deploy the database servers for key production services. However, with the introduction of virtualization technology, software and hardware systems are isolated by intermediate virtualization management programs, which also brings some management difficulties. For IT administrators, IT is much more difficult to monitor the resource requirements of virtual machines, evaluate the performance of virtual machines, and complete timely capacity planning.

The management challenges brought by these virtual architectures will become more and more serious as virtual machines expand and deploy throughout the enterprise. Similarly, enterprises are accustomed to using software to identify, evaluate, and monitor virtual machines to ensure that the server resources in the virtualized data center are always available.

Difficulties in managing virtualized data centers

Virtualization Technology brings a lot of benefits to modern data centers, but it also brings many new management challenges to administrators. One of these management challenges is tracking physical servers and virtual machines. In traditional physical environments, administrators can easily locate physical servers, identify applications running on them, and measure their performance.

Virtualization technology integrates a large number of virtual machines into a unified physical server. In addition, most Virtual Machine technologies support the transfer of virtual machines across physical servers when necessary. The result is that administrators are very difficult to identify the physical host where a specific virtual machine is located, and they are more difficult to solve the resource allocation problem.

The free migration of virtual machines also brings about the threat of server virtualization security and weakens the consistency of enterprise management. Traditional security methods rely on network traffic monitoring. when data is transmitted between servers, data flows through switches are generated. After virtualization, data exchange between virtual machines on the same physical server is often unable to be monitored. In this case, security requirements have become a new concern of security experts.

"Now we can only see the data that enters the server box," 6 connect Inc ., peter Sclafani, co-founder and vice president of the company (based in San Jose, Calif, to provide management services), said, "hackers can easily launch attacks on one of these virtual machines, and now they have switched to new attack channels, which cannot be monitored."

Virtual architecture management and Virtual Machine Expansion

Another point to note is the security risks that may arise when virtual machines are migrated between different servers.

Administrators also need to face the risks of Virtual Machine scaling, which is caused by uncontrolled Virtual Machine reproduction within the enterprise. Manual evaluation, tracking, and management of virtual machines is a very difficult task. Under vague or unclear authorization rules, the problems caused by unlimited reproduction of virtual machines may become more serious. If the management of operating systems and application licenses is out of control, it may even cause the company to be economically or legally punished unconsciously.

"Virtual CPUs are different from physical CPUs in The past," said Bob Plankers (The Lone Sysadmin technical consultant and column blogger.

Every time a virtual machine is created, it will increase the costs of operating system licenses, management tools, backup clients, and other aspects. This does not include other management difficulties, he said so.

In modern data centers, the number of virtual machines is much larger than the Administrator's ability to perform correct and effective management. To cope with these management challenges, administrators need to rely on the rich management functions provided by virtual architecture management tools.

For example, management tools need to provide system architecture-related management capabilities, such as resource and capacity management, virtual machine lifecycle management, automatic or policy-based Virtual Machine migration, remote access, and performance monitoring. In general, management tools can provide control over the entire management process, such as service provision, access and policy management, usage reports, non-disruptive Virtual Machine backup/disaster recovery and path management capabilities.

Some tools also provide active service capabilities, allowing users to complete some simple management tasks on their own, so as to release administrator resources to solve major problems encountered in virtualization management. There are also some tools to help manage Virtual Machine images, reduce the number of available Virtual Machine images, and accelerate the creation process of standardized virtual machines. (