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July 19, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Virtual Machines - "Another Thing you Have to Manage"
InfoWorld recently launched their first Virtualization Executive Forum -- taking place later this year in New York (fitting, considering how entrenched virtualization is in the financial services world). Looking at the program, it appears that the program is primarily concentrated on the benefits of virtualization ... but I'd be interested to see a little more discussion surface about the nuances / challenges of actually managing virtual environments.
As another InfoWorld blogger discussed nearly a year ago, sometimes it gets lost in the shuffle that virtual machines themselves are not the cure-all for IT management ... and in fact are another layer of complexity and themselves must be managed.
I recently touched base with Levanta's product and marketing manager, David Dennis, who drilled down a bit more on the management challenges when you start bringing virtual machines into your environment:
"People are using VM's in tandem with physical hardware ... and that reality presents management challenges on a number of levels.While XenSource has the Xen Optimizer to manage Xen, and VMware has VirtualCenter and VMotion -- neither can manage the other. In addition, neither can manage non-virtualized machines. And further complicating the matter, the management tools from the non-virtualized distributions are going to be different from how an organization will want to manage their VMs. Technologies like YaST, yum, and Red Hat Network can provide content for a virtual container, but do nothing for portability.
So the problem is, very few of the management approaches out there today take into account the idea that people will want to move their virtual machines around wherever they want to, or in some cases, flip between the virtual world and the physical world. The challenge is being able to move the virtual container from a rack to a blade to a box or from a development environment to a production environment."
The trick is for the individual lowest-level servers to be simple and quick to change. Virtualization doesn't seem to help that and it tends to require larger servers which are more complicated to deal with as well. The successful grids seem to be comprised of small, often blade, servers that are managed as commodity. You basically roll out 100's at a time and you target them with images. With a virtualized machine, you tend to have more complexity and problems with resource sharing than if the servers are physically separate.
Posted by Harper Mann on July 19, 2006 07:31 PM
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I agree! New virtualization technologies are emerging across the datacenter, from processors, to servers, to storage and networking. While virtualization can help turn fixed resources into more flexible ones, and can be a useful tool for enterprise datacenters, it also may add several more layers of complexity that need to be managed.
In a previous career I was the CTO of a large investment bank and I can tell you, physical complexity in the datacenter is something people have been battling for 15-20 years. Now, with virtualization emerging from the server to the processor and everything in between, datacenters are fighting virtual as well as physical complexity. Don’t believe the hype – virtualization is not the new nirvana, it’s just one more shift in enterprise technology that needs to be managed…and managed carefully.
While it would be nice, it’s unrealistic to buy into the notion that one piece of software can manage the hundreds of thousands of physical and virtual resources in an enterprise datacenter (remember that’s what Tivoli, CA and HP sold us 15 years ago!). I believe that enterprises need to be re-thinking the whole datacenter architecture from the ground up. For example, adding server virtualization on top of inflexible, under utilized, legacy servers won’t solve much. I believe that a new architecture is the only way to manage the complexity and derive real value from IT again.
Think about it. Today, hundreds of servers are turning into thousands of virtual machines. Aside from the obvious management issues this creates, availability and disaster recovery become more important – as more applications are vulnerable to a single hardware failure. Questions IT should be asking: How can I maximize the value from hypervisors without creating more complexity? How can I ensure high availability in a virtualized environment at an affordable price? How can I provide disaster recovery for virtual servers?
I’d start by creating servers that are essentially just processors and memory, and eliminate all of the other physical components that give servers a fixed identity, or state. Connect them together with a high speed fabric, and consolidate the I/O to eliminate most of the surrounding “glue� that connects servers to IP and storage networks. Replace the physical components with virtual ones, so you can add and subtract resources dynamically. For servers that will host critical applications, make sure that redundancy and high availability are built-in. Now you can take advantage of some of the virtualization technologies that are emerging, because you’re putting it on top of an architecture that is significantly less complex, and designed with virtualization in mind.
It’s time to stop the layering and adding to the problem with software that only temporarily masks complexity instead of eliminating it. Masking complexity is not the same thing as achieving simplicity. Customers should be carefully evaluating their underlying architecture to avoid problems later on.
