Network World’s Tom Henderson and Rand Dvorak published Part II on their series about virtualization technologies. In Part II, Taming The Virtual Beast , the examine products that help you manage and provision virtual environments.
As part of the analysis, five areas are considered with looking at VM management technologies:
- How are VM snapshots versions assembled and subsequently tracked?
- How are moves, adds and changes of VM hosts, their guests, the kind of applications used on them administered?
- How is VM and application availability monitored?
- How are user and administrative roles managed across VMs?
- What forensics mechanisms are available to help determine why a VM was drastically altered in any way?
There’s certainly one other are I would want explored; performance management in a virtual world. This may be implied in the “application availability monitoring” but I see it as a more explicit objective.
Virtualization not only adds another layer of abstraction between hardware and software environments, it breaks the direct one-to-one link between application and hardware. One box can operating many virtual instances depending on load and throughput.
Since server consolidation is the current “killer app” driving virtualization, understanding the interplay of virtual machines configured to run on one box or across multiple hardware boxes becomes much more important.
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