One of the most often touted advantages of virtualization is that it’s extremely simple because you don’t have to manage the physical entities. In fact, having services “in the cloud” tends to encourage an “out of sight is out of mind” mentality, with the cloud providing the requisite haze.
While reflecting on the report, “2010 Virtualization: Benefits, Challenges and Solutions,” Steve asked the question, “In spite of the oft-touted view that virtualization brings simplicity, the report discusses numerous challenges that are faced in a virtualized environment. I would be most eager to hear from the community as to what you see as the three most significant challenges and how you go about addressing these challenges.”
An excellent response was provided by Ken Ferderer, CTO at Linesider Technologies, as excerpted here. Among Ken’s comments, “Virtualization if done right, does bring simplicity, however, ‘doing it right’ is where the complexity lies. As we learned early-on with our customers that operate highly virtualized data centers and cloud environments (both public and private) the biggest challenges that they faced include:
“1. Shifting costs and smaller ROIs than initially projected. Industry reports and analysts have confirmed that operational cost simply shifted from the data center into the network infrastructure. Engineers are now sitting at network device command lines building security and access profiles for virtual resources that are being requested at unprecedented rates. Once network access and security is in place, already strained IT organizations are faced with unending change requests as the virtual resources are moved, re-allocated, re-provisioned or retired.
“2. Provisioning still not meeting desired timeframes. One of the key goals of virtualization has always been a more nimble IT provisioning operation that could finally meet the demands of the business… “I need it NOW”. Companies are finding however, that the rapid deployment and increased flexibility compute virtualization provides tends to get negated and constrained by an inflexible and fragile network infrastructure bound by manual provisioning of network devices and services that still takes days to provision.
“3. Lack of automation for highly dynamic virtual infrastructures. Most companies that have invested heavily in virtualization and cloud solutions find that existing framework automation solutions from companies such as HP, BMC, CA, IBM and EMC cannot scale to the demands of highly dynamic operations simply because these traditional framework solutions are built on architectures driven by manually constructed scripts and templates that are as inflexible and cumbersome as the traditional command-line interfaces.
“The goal of network service virtualization solutions is to provide the same level of service virtualization and fluidity across all three key domain areas – compute, storage AND network. These NSV engines can automate the key network infrastructure layer-2, layer-3 and security services while orchestrating interactions across all three of these domains as a single holistic offering that enables true on-demand IT service provisioning and delivery.
“By doing so, the NSV engine removes the cost that was shifted into the network infrastructure by automating traditional command-line activities and reduces the time required to provision and deploy virtual or cloud services from hours/days to seconds. Additionally, the new breed NSV engines have been architected specifically for new dynamic cloud operations and can drive these services without the scripts and templates that constrain traditional framework vendors.”
Many thanks to Ken for sharing these observations, we encourage you to join this discussion.
