No advance: Virtualization management also needs planning

While virtualization itself is not novel, the amount of work and traffic that virtualization brings to the network is now being brought to the attention of network administrators. The advent of virtual machines and vmotion real-time migration scenarios allows IT managers to combine their IT environments to organize their devices to make the most of their resources. But one side effect of this is that every virtual machine being migrated involves a group of virtual ports, virtual switches, and distributed virtual Switch groups. At some stage, the information about these migrations and changes has to be passed through a physical network, and the corresponding physical ports will be restricted.

This makes virtualization management critical. "It's important to manage virtualization throughout its lifecycle," said Paul Mew, RAMSAC technical director of service providers. As the design, implementation, and development phases require management, the evaluation and testing process must also be managed. ”

So far, few people have used vmotion to automate virtual migrations and changes. But Sanjay Castelino, vice president of SolarWinds's product marketing, predicts that they will soon be using the ability to plan virtualization capabilities when network administrators foresee the same problems as system management and storage management. To downfield and document clutter, to avoid confusion, to manage and record all configuration information Strictly.

"Virtualization is generating a series of new problems that data center vendors and network administrators have never encountered," Castelino said. "In the virtualized world, overlapping of responsibilities makes the problem more complex." One of the problems is that a glitch can prevent applications from accessing virtual storage, virtual systems, or virtual networks. Castelino said: "If you do not properly deal with virtualization in the network, then the managers will blame each other."

Administrative tools can help network administrators avoid and diagnose problems while helping to maintain multiple departments working on the same form. "You need four different administrators who have a stake in the project, and you have to make sure that they all understand how the network works," said Bob Quillin, the chief marketing officer of Hyper 9, a virtualization management company recently acquired by SolarWinds. and access to the same data. ”

Create the basics of virtualization management

Before you can apply virtualization management tools, you must start with a clear goal and be as ready as possible. Jonathan Lampe, vice president of Ipswitch File transmits product management, provides the following recommendations for your virtualization project:

1. Prepare a virtualization overview document that includes goals, objectives, success criteria, and a list of constraints and high-level risks.

2. Use a 2-tier or 3-tier discovery tool to prepare a detailed web listing. This identifies the physical server in your network environment and details how everything is connected--thinning to a single port.

3. Network capacity planning is as important as system capacity planning. Measure everything-processor utilization, memory utilization, and storage and network usage. If a server or network is overloaded, it will not be virtualized. You may need to book more bandwidth or memory, so it's good to warn beforehand.

4. Understand the impact of the network on the application. Because you may lose 10% to 50% of your network performance for virtualization, you need to test most of your resource-intensive applications simultaneously in bare metal (not virtualized) and virtualized environments.

5. Actively prepare the plan to deal with the interruption while defining the service level agreement as strictly as possible. Your project will have more opportunities to succeed and achieve ROI goals.