Enabling Virtual Environments

Tim Silk, Systems Engineering Manager, Data Center Federal Team, Cisco

Your IT staff have completed their virtualization proof-of-concept testing. Now what? The benefits of server consolidation using virtualized servers are well-known and widely used across the U.S. government. However, most virtual machines today remain in the lab, not the data center. How will you virtualize and migrate your core mission applications into your operational environment to fully benefit from virtualization?

Physical Servers

The idea of consolidating thousands of physical servers down by an order of magnitude and running IT services on virtualized applications is both rational and economical. But consider what it takes to deploy and manage your server infrastructure. Each physical server provides a tangible object to configure and manage. Each network and storage connection leads to a physical interface on a server and a physical port on a switch. This physical aspect allows you to:

• Not only see each asset, but touch it, disconnect it, or power it down as you wish
• Monitor and manage devices and connections via common management systems

Although virtual machine products today include innovative tools for managing virtual environments, an IT staff's ability to apply a well-established physical paradigm to today's virtual world presents new challenges for the CIO.

Technological Challenges

Your servers are now virtual machines running multiple applications on fewer physical servers. As a result:

• The physical paradigm has broken down, and you can no longer touch and see your servers.
• The additional layer of abstraction at the virtual machine level now masks visibility into applications and services.
• Data to, from, and between servers is no longer distinguishable on the network and may not be visible at all.
• Reallocating computing resources by moving virtual machines between physical servers requires you to reestablish network policies and configurations for the relocated services.

These challenges demand innovative solutions from IT companies and, just as importantly, they require innovative organizations to implement the solutions. The network must provide a mechanism that recognizes physical and virtual machines, beyond mere IP-aware intelligence. The network must also gracefully extend into the virtual environment and provide consistent, coherent services and management. Virtual machines must be visible and manageable from the network just as physical servers are today, regardless of where the virtual machine resides. This necessary progression of network intelligence toward the server continues to blur the lines between network and server and storage.

Company Challenges

The most challenging obstacles to facilitating virtualization, however, lie within the organization itself. The first challenge for the CIO is to maintain the core competencies of staff while also building their skills in new technologies that promote operational efficiencies.. Specific knowledge and skills in systems, storage, and networks remain critical, but the challenge becomes making the sum of the parts greater than the whole. Data center teams can no longer work in silos. Following are some new issues that teams must face:

• Virtual machine intelligence is moving out to the network as network intelligence is moving into the server.
• The traditional network access layer is collapsing into the server architecture.
• Servers now host more network intelligence in the form of a virtual machine-aware software driver or a software switch.

The boundary therefore becomes not one between server and network, but one between server and application. Network access now begins in the server, not at the end of a copper cable, but it continues to be managed within the network by a network specialist. This new paradigm demands cooperation among data center teams and mutual understanding of the services that these teams collectively provide.

The key to facilitating virtualization is in understanding that these technological innovations are guiding organizational change. Your staff should adopt and embrace the paradigm shift from physical to virtual and from silos to teams. They can quickly begin to understand the links among data center components, and deploy integrated services that tie together processing, network, storage, and application requirements. To promote successful server virtualization, you should:

• Bring your data center teams together
• Assemble a task force or committee of team members from across your organization as a "virtualization team"
• Encourage openness, sharing, and cross-training

A virtualization team will help prepare your organization for the new technologies rapidly coming to market today. The more you mold your IT staff/s collective understanding of the entire data center environment, the more successful their combined efforts will be in meeting your organization's core mission needs.