VMWare is not new. It has been around for nearly 10 years. The difference is now, it's becoming mainstream. Companies are building entire IT strategies around VMWare and vendors are supplying tools and products for virtualization.
We recently got serious about VMWare in our IT group. Server consolidation, legacy hardware retirement, greater utilization of resources, and cost reductions are driving virtualization for us, all lead by VMWare. I've been reading a lot about VMWare, particularly VMWare networking and I have to say I'm impressed. I think VMWare is a hurricane of change to how IT infrastructure organizations plan for, provision, and manage hardware. But this change brings very interesting network issues (as all change does).
From a strategic standpoint, VMWare introduces three large issues:
- Network Utilization changes
- Critical Need for Proactive Capacity Management
- Network Design integration with VMWare servers
For most servers, network utilization at a host level was generally not an issue. Most servers are connected at 1 Gbps in today's data centers which provides plenty of bandwidth for most windows and linux servers. However, now with VMWare, imagine 20 virtual servers all using that single 1 Gbps interface. Now things get more interesting.
Because of this change, a proactive network capacity management program is now critical. VMWare does not (right now) have the ability to automatically balance virtual machines across different physical servers based on network load (only CPU and memory are used to make that decision). So, monitoring the network infrastructure to a host port level will become paramount to identifying and preventing service degradation.
Finally, VMWare ESX software runs its own Layer-2 software switch to provide connectivity to virtual machines. This switch needs to be integrated to the physical network with dot1q trunking, Layer-2 features, and VLAN design. Add to this VMWare's very cool VMotion technology, which has its own specific network needs. Now networking for servers is no longer a VLAN and a port.
I'll expand on these topics and more in forthcoming blogs, but if you haven't started reading about VMWare, now is the time to start.
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Michael Morris is a communications engineering manager at a $3-billion high-tech company. His background is in enterprise WANs working with telcos and developing large-scale routing designs. He has worked on networks at government and corporate organizations, including networks at two Fortune 10 companies. In his current role, he leads a team of 10 engineers responsible for large-scale IT networking projects and architectural standards for data networks, storage area networks, IP telephony, contact centers, and security. Michael is CCIE #11733 and recently became one of the first three Cisco Certified Design Experts (CCDE) ever (#20080002). He has 11 years experience in networking and communications, including four years as a paratrooper in the U.S. Army. He has a bachelor's degree in MIS from the University at Buffalo and is working on his MBA from NC State University. In 2008, he was awarded the Network Professional Association (NPA) Professional Excellence and Innovation Award for his work on network architecture, templates and enterprise MPLS design.
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