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
