How to manage the virtual network relationships of data centers?

Data center network administrators now need to "reconnect" physical resources and virtualization workloads to learn how they are used and how they are managed.

From the perspective of management and monitoring, this requirement for connecting physical resources and virtual workloads will drive a part of the entire virtualization industry. Many companies are dedicated to developing a product that provides an "end-to-end view" of physical resources and how they are applied in various virtualization workloads at specific times. As the final state of this ideal has not yet been implemented, IT is important that all IT organizations consider not just the data center network team-What steps can be taken at this time.

Documentation is crucial

First, it is vital to have a large number of documents. A complete, comprehensive, and easy-to-understand document is important to any information technology project or implementation. It is especially important for server virtualization projects and the impact of these projects on the data center network. This document must contain a detailed summary of network configurations that support virtualization projects, such as the location where the link set-802.3ad/LACP or any private protocol-is used. VLAN and 802.1q VLAN trunk line information must also be included.

In addition, the data center network administrator must use any other network Protocol support provided by the virtualization method, such as VMware ESX that supports Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP. CDP supports VMware ESX 3.5 and later versions, and also provides a data center network administrator with a way to map the connection between the host server NIC and the switch port.

Restrict dynamic migration

In addition, the server administrator must work with the network manager and other teams to better manage technologies for dynamically moving VMS on different physical servers. Dynamic migration-moving a running VM from one physical host to another is usually useful, and some vendors have extended dynamic migration, enables automatic VM adjustment to respond to resource requirements.

However, before the end-to-end view becomes acceptable, server administrators must be more conservative when using dynamic technologies. Although conservative use limits the flexibility of the virtual environment, it helps simplify the ing between applications and physical resources, and makes troubleshooting and performance management easier.

Survey Management Tools

Although some network visibility may be lost due to the introduction of server virtual technology, many products can help restore network visibility. The view function of network traffic mode and traffic is an important part of understanding the relationship between various applications and underlying physical resources. Organizations that rely heavily on such information must investigate the use of third-party products that provide information and view virtual network traffic.

At the same time, organizations must carefully investigate applications that claim to support visualized end-to-end applications, virtual machines, and physical resources. This type of application is still under development and evolution, but there are already some good products on the market. These applications collect information from different channels, including physical and virtual ones, and link the information to help organizations understand which applications/VMS are using which physical resources. From this perspective, the data center administrator can more accurately adjust network configurations to adapt to traffic flow and connection modes.

As server virtualization continues to mature, more applications will be used to better complete tasks, in this way, the data center administrator can view, understand, and manage the network traffic modes based on the information provided, and how these modes reflect the VMS running on different physical hosts.

More comprehensive cooperation between server virtualization providers and data network providers will also provide more methods to map VMS to physical resources, which will also help us to handle important related transactions.