Thoughts on Virtual Infrastructure Management

Clouds or Fog: it is your choice!

By Rob Strechay

I recently gave a presentation on this Thornton May’s IT Value Studio. My feeling is that the concept of private vs public clouds, one virtualization flavor vs another, really will hamper the idea of cloud providers. Today’s cloud service providers are giving out virtual machines that are configured with particular application infrastructures. Not ideal for legacy application workloads. Current clouds are for “new applications” that are written to one or another clouds provider specs.

I also agree with John Gavin, CEO of Akorri when he said “Virtualization used to be all about the low-hanging fruit, where server consolidation and cost management were the drivers. Now it’s really all about simplifying management and managing performance issues when in mission-critical applications.” I agree with him, full disclouser, not becuase he signs my pay checks … but he is dead right.

But for cloud/grid/dynamic IT to become real, been saying this since my stint with GGF/OGF, not only do we need to stop recreating standards, but we need the right standards. One in particular that would nice to see adopted and would jump-start would be Open Virtualization Format (OVF) really being used. We need standards; maybe not even new ones but right ones.

Another issue that will have to be addressed is performance and service level management in this environment. Right now the number one reason people do not virtualize is the strength of business units. What I mean here is if a business unit within a company had a bad experience with virtual so they went back to Physical in some cases; not a death nail but the role out slows dramatically.

Virtualization is the new whipping boy for IT. This is why understanding (baselining) pre-virtualization like our customers do, then comparing and managing to “all systems are green” from an infrastructure perspective is so important. Mature virtualized organizations, some at 90%+ virtualized have realized this. When I am talking to them they rank stability, availability and performance as the top concerns they battle from the FUD of business units.

This is not rocket science. Baseline what you have (physical), convert and test (test baseline), make the decision to virtualize, measure impact to the production virtual environment, and compare ongoing operations versus the baseline. Like the directions on a shampoo bottle … shampoo, rinse, and repeat as desired.

June 23, 2009 | Filed Under Customer Experiences, Performance, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment