nongdan | 
12 30th, 2007| 
Virtualization may be becoming something ubiquitous and essential to operations
Now that companies have mastered the virtualization of server operations, vendors are increasingly selling the idea of virtualizing the entire data center. The idea of enabling the dynamic management of servers, storage and network devices through a single “fabric” places new virtualization offerings firmly in the realm of becoming a data center platform. That platform may spawn a new IT position for a person who would supervise the management of the virtual layer of server, network and storage infrastructures.
Virtualization may be becoming something so ubiquitous and essential to operations that it has become a new form of operating system for the data center. The idea began percolating most recently in September during VMware Inc.’s VMworld 2007. During a speech, Patrick Gelsinger, Intel Corp.’s senior vice president and general manager, said “Virtualization disaggregates the traditional view of the operating system and creates the opportunity for us to create a data center operating system of tomorrow.”
The discussion gained momentum when Cisco Systems Inc. and VMware announced an integration initiative wherein Cisco’s VFrame Data Center would include VMware Infrastructure 3. The appliance upgrade, a product that fits into the Cisco’s Data Center 3.0 vision, is intended to automate IT orchestration in the areas of server, network and storage provisioning for shops invested in Cisco hardware. By adding service orchestration, VFrame can use a service template to provision network services for Internet-facing applications running on VMware Infrastructure, including firewalls, content load balancing, switch and server trunks, and access control lists.
VFrame dynamically loads VMware’s ESX Server onto bare-metal computer hardware, configures the physical server I/O to use Cisco data center switches and offers a two-way policy API with VMware VirtualCenter to coordinate the configuration. As a result, data center operators can mix and match the right amount of hardware services and server resources to a particular set of applications.
Krish Ramakrishnan, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s server virtualization business unit, likens the individual functions delivered in the release by each company to the operations of a planned community. “Think about VMware assigning renters individual apartments,” he said, “and VFrame coordinating all their requirements as to where they get automatic gym memberships, get their rights to the pool, their rights to the recreation room, their keys, rather than having to apply to each of those departments.”
Now in beta among unnamed customers, the $50,000 VFrame appliance is especially relevant in multiuser environments such as service providers, where multiple customers are sharing the same server, storage and networking infrastructure, according to Brian Byun, vice president of global partners and solutions at VMware. “It’s giving [customers] a set of knobs at two levels,” said Byun. “At the physical network layer and another at the virtual layer.”
Less like an operating system, more like middleware?
At least one analyst considers the increasing virtualization of the data center as less operating system-like and more akin to data center middleware.
“VMware and Cisco are describing a near future where our data centers are made of components … which can be easily provisioned,” said Alessandro Perilli, an independent industry analyst for virtualization.info, an online news digest about virtualization technologies. “This provisioning can be partially or completely automated.”
In Perilli’s scenario, devices that make up the individual storage, server or network infrastructures no longer dominate the view of the data center because each often requires the expertise of specialists. Rather the applications required by the business units or – in the case of a service provider – customers determine the setup of the data center. Those traditionally siloed operations become “mere bounds of an application, which change dynamically, depending on workload,” he said.
According to Perilli, an “autonomic” data center requires two pieces: the infrastructure to be dynamically manipulated and the management middleware that performs the manipulation.
In the case of the new release of VFrame, VMware owns the virtual infrastructure and Cisco has expertise in the management middleware, “which can apply to physical and virtual infrastructures indifferently,” he said.
The obstacles to ubiquitous virtualization
Likewise, VMware’s Byun said his company doesn’t use the term “operating system” to describe the direction its technology is heading. “VMware provides a core set of tools, but on top of that, there’s so much to do,” which presumably is done by VMware’s 600 partners.
And that provides a barrier to the concept of virtualization becoming some kind of data center mastermind. Running IT in a sizable organization requires multiple vendors, technologies and implementations, making the job highly complex. “Even the best product in the market would be unable to provide an omni-comprehensive solution which fits every customer’s environment,” said Perilli. Massive time and money would be required to adopt the mandatory technologies essential in building the autonomic data center.
Along with technology requirements, virtualization changes the nature of the relationships among data center personnel. Whereas previously a database administrator might requisition the storage and server administrators for the resources required for a given operation, Byun said, “it doesn’t happen that way anymore.”
Now resources are provided as pools and administrators provision it whatever way they want. “It turns more into a batch process,” he said. “It’s something some of our customers are getting used to” – to the point where a new role is emerging, that of the virtual infrastructure expert who sits “very close to the storage, networking and server disciplines.”
That introduces the second major obstacle: the cultural change necessary among personnel, management and even customers. “A technology which introduces some levels of automation brings in even more suspicion because it cuts away the human factor,” said Perilli. “We don’t consider IT automation as something really smart and reliable yet because we are at the beginning of it.”
Sometimes you just need your hands on the equipment
Which leads to the fact that sometimes virtualization gets in the way of operations – something Cisco has considered.
What’s lesser known about VFrame is a feature Cisco’s Ramakrishnan calls “unvirtualization.” “When things go wrong, you need to be able to look at the physical devices to debug anything,” he explained. “VFrame can do all the tracing that’s needed.” It’ll map out the servers being used, the application, the switches, the load balancers and storage to enable the user to troubleshoot in a virtual environment.
Dian Schaffhauser is a writer and editor who covers business and technology for a number of publications. Contact her at dian@dischaffhauser.com.
