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Copyright The TANEJA Group, Inc. 2008. All Rights Reserved
87 Elm Street, Suite 900 Hopkinton, MA 01748 Tel: 508-435-5040 Fax: 508-435-1530 www.tanejagroup.com
Switching on the Virtual World: The Role of Fabric-Driven
Services for the Virtualized Environment
September 2008
Virtualization in the data center is widely accepted and deployments are growing
at a fast clip. The advantages of virtualizing servers, networks and storage are
compelling: consolidating and utilizing resources, higher availability with
redundant virtualized paths, and added flexibility to change the IT infrastructure
are just a few of them.
at a fast clip. The advantages of virtualizing servers, networks and storage are
compelling: consolidating and utilizing resources, higher availability with
redundant virtualized paths, and added flexibility to change the IT infrastructure
are just a few of them.
However, there is a looming disparity between physical and virtual environments in terms of
managing and securing data. This is because SAN management software depends on physical
attributes of devices, but virtualization masks these very attributes. If management software
cannot pierce through the virtualization veil to secure and manage data by application priority,
then many of the virtualization initiatives in the data center will backfire. Server virtualization
alone will be successful in the elementary terms of consolidating physical machines, but will
threaten QoS, security, performance and troubleshooting in the entire virtual environment.
For the fabric to evolve to fully support virtualized storage in the data center fabric vendors
must evolve their feature sets and operating systems to enable users to employ virtualization
securely and economically to best serve business processes. This enables IT to place
virtualization support services in the fabric in order to serve large virtual server and storage
deployments. Smart vendors recognize this and are updating their offerings for the virtualized
worlds.
Virtualizing the Data Center
Many data center managers and IT
professionals still think of virtualization as
consolidating servers. This is virtualization’s
original and still strongest usage, but
virtualization is increasingly sophisticated in
this area and is extending beyond the basics
when it comes to networking and storage
virtualization.
•
professionals still think of virtualization as
consolidating servers. This is virtualization’s
original and still strongest usage, but
virtualization is increasingly sophisticated in
this area and is extending beyond the basics
when it comes to networking and storage
virtualization.
•
Server virtualization. The key here is
abstracting the physical server from the
applications and their data. Server
abstracting the physical server from the
applications and their data. Server
virtualization abstracts server resources
from applications; applications share
CPUs,
from applications; applications share
CPUs,
memory,
and
network
infrastructure as shared resource pools.
Developed capabilities from virtual server
vendors include the ability to share more
computing resources and to dynamically
migrate VMs.
Developed capabilities from virtual server
vendors include the ability to share more
computing resources and to dynamically
migrate VMs.
•
Storage
network
virtualization.
Virtualizing the network enables IT to
create multiple virtual fabric components
from physical ones. Usages include
assigning network resources to VMs using
create multiple virtual fabric components
from physical ones. Usages include
assigning network resources to VMs using