New product maps virtual machines to the network
In its recent “Network Automation 2011” report, Enterprise Management Associates noted that IP address management is a critically important target of increased automation among the 100 mid-level network managers, engineers and architects it surveyed for the study.
Perhaps that’s because the number of IP addresses within enterprises is expected to grow rather substantially this year. In the survey, EMA learned that roughly two-thirds of organizations are expecting IP address quantities to grow between 1 and 25%, with another 16% pegging that rate at 26 to 50%. The primary reasons? Server virtualization and proliferation of virtual machines, each cited by 65% of the respondents when asked about expected causes of IP address growth.
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This trend can mean trouble for enterprise IT managers. A widely acknowledged challenge of server virtualization is that as its use grows, visibility and management problems start cropping up. And these, inevitably, lead to finger pointing between the server and network management teams.
Infoblox, a network infrastructure automation and control vendor, says it has a new product that will help curb such problems. IPAM Insight, an advanced IP address management product, “will bridge the management gap between physical and virtual networks,” says Steve Nye, the company’s executive vice president of product strategy and corporate development.
IPAM Insight combines Infoblox’s IP address management capabilities with the discovery engine it gained through last spring’s acquisition of Netcordia, a change and configuration management vendor, Nye says. “We can now pick up very rich Layer 2 information and combine that with Layer 3 discovery information … so we can map IP addresses to physical and virtual network devices.”
With IPAM Insight, he adds, the network team will be able to delegate IP address management to the virtualization team. IPAM Insight will serve as a central repository for all IP addresses, will aid in the discovery of unmanaged IP addresses, and will map VMs to the network automatically. “IT will be able to use it for troubleshooting, for understanding the relationship between a VM and a particular port or switch, for changing and moving VMs without losing connectivity,” for example, he says.
As enterprises scale up their use of virtualization, the real challenge is in how to conform the network to the virtualized environment – and IPAM Insight is the first step in doing that, Nye says.
