Right now everyone is looking to build the virtual data center and for good reason – ideally it is easier to manage, costs less, and can be more easily adapted to changing application and IT requirements. But as organizations look to build out their virtual data centers, they also need to make sure that the complexities and costs associated with managing them do not overrun their benefits.
Every day more stories emerge about how the complexity of managing virtualized data centers can result in new or unexpected management costs. These costs can offset or even outweigh the benefits that a virtualized data center is supposed to provide which becomes ever more likely as organizations cannot see or manage the infrastructure components that are now virtualized.
Peter Fetterolf, a partner with networking consultancy Network Strategy Partners LLC, recently said in a SearchNetworking.com article, “There are cases where you can prove a positive ROI for server virtualization. I’m sure there are also many, many cases where you cannot. It really depends on the situation and the enterprise. With server virtualization, there are a lot [of] issues that need to be analyzed. A single physical device running 10 virtual servers is more complex than 10 separate devices.”
A recent Computerworld story reports that J. Craig Venter Institute Inc.’s computer systems manager, Eddy Navarro, continually faces issues as part of managing his virtual data center. Dealing with extra technology layers, scheduling maintenance and backups and troubleshooting performance are just some of the problems he deals with in managing his virtual data center.
He says, “In the traditional [physical] model, it is a straightforward deduction to say that this application maps to these disks so that must be where the hot spot is. But with virtualization, if things are running slowly and there’s this amorphous pool of storage, where exactly is the problem? You want to make sure you have the proper tools to tell you where the problems are.”
Navarro’s final comment gets to the heart of what is required to effectively manage a virtual data center: proper management tools. Each layer of virtualization (server, network or storage) within a data center should make it easier to dynamically respond to application requirements such as changing workloads or hardware malfunctions. However that only works if each layer of the virtualization software is cognizant of the environment in which it is running.
A current drawback of virtualization software is that it is still largely unaware of the state of the applications running on it or the hardware on which it runs. Because it can not always dynamically detect and respond to changing applications loads or hardware malfunctions, when these types of problems do occur, they can be a nightmare for system administrators to diagnose and troubleshoot.
This makes it a prerequisite for those organizations creating virtual data centers to ensure that they are also putting in place software that can manage their virtual infrastructure. This software must do more than just detect and manage that virtualized resources exist. It needs to look underneath the covers, so to speak, to uncover what physical resources constitute each virtual layer so an administrator can use the software to map applications and the virtual infrastructure on which they reside back to the physical resources they are using.
Symantec’s Veritas CommandCentral is an example of software that is intended to help organizations address these exact problems in their virtual data centers. Using CommandCentral, organizations can again pierce the veil that virtualization creates by mapping applications back to the virtualized physical resources they are using.
In so doing, organizations can more quickly get to the root cause of problems in virtualized environments by diagnosing the underlying issues and then troubleshooting them. They can also leverage CommandCentral to avoid these problems in the first place by using it to effectively visualize their environment so applications are only assigned virtualized resources that are most suited for that application.
Many are assuming that the virtualization of data centers in the next decade is a foregone conclusion. I would agree. But keeping a virtual data center’s complexity and costs under control will largely hinge on how well positioned organizations are to deconstruct the virtual infrastructure so they visualize, manage and then work on its underlying physical elements. Only through the use of storage resource management tools such as Veritas CommandCentral can they accomplish this goal.