Bladewatch.com

Search Networking

Virtualization is coming to a network near you, but what do networking professionals really need to know about data center virtualization and virtual server networks? With budgets tight all around, network administrators must think long and hard about how virtualization plays into network planning and how soon they will see a return on investment (ROI) from possible purchases.

It is not even clear that all enterprises will see a net benefit from virtual servers.

“There are cases where you can prove a positive ROI for sure for server virtualization,” said Peter Fetterolf, a partner with networking consultancy Network Strategy Partners LLC. “I’m sure there are also many, many cases where you cannot. It really depends on the situation and the enterprise. With server virtualization, there are a lot [of] issues that need to be analyzed.”

Unfortunately, Fetterolf said, many of those issues are hidden network costs that are tough to gauge pre-deployment: How will the move affect staffing requirements, and what will be the cost of added complexity, such as increased downtime?

While there might be fewer physical switches and routers, a virtualization strategy often means more logical, virtual devices that also have to be managed. But now, many traditional networking tools, such as probes, may not spot problems unless specifically created for a virtual environment.

Just because a networking professional cannot see the problem, in other words, does not mean it’s not there and in need of some creative responses.

If these changes are not properly accounted for, the network could possibly even see greater, not reduced, network downtime as networking professionals struggle to get a grip on virtualization.

We need to be looking at the whole infrastructure when we look at virtualization, we also need to include those back-up, backoffice networks used for failing over workloads,  backing up the virtual machines or high availability. With this inmind we need to think about the different applications being virtualized, what their individual network requirements are, whether they are currently supported, that the network infrastructure and cabling are in place and presented to the ESX server. An interesting read do check it out.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.