Virtualization; it seems that I can’t get through a day without talking about it. It’s definitely the wave of the future, when someone discusses cutting cost, or ease of administration or planning for the future of their network, invariably we’ll bring up virtualization…unless they do first. It appeals to network administrators because administering a couple server platforms is easier than 10 servers. It appeals to management because it’s “green,” yeah, I said you can’t get through a day without hearing about that either these days…thanks Al! The appeal is obvious; ease of administration, lessening your power consumption, cooling requirements, doing more with less, and we have yet to touch on the DR capabilities of virtual solutions.

This is a good chance to discuss the benefits that I’ve seen from down here in the trenches. The number one benefit that network administrators will appreciate, and that I’ve already benefited from comes to light best for remotely managed clients with a virtual environment. It becomes much easier to worry about network connectivity for a couple servers and the SAN, versus the dozen physical servers that we came from. Without getting especially product-centric I will mention that my experiences to date have been with Citrix’s virtualization product, XenServer. The underlying technology does not differ all that much from platform to platform. I’m sure there are some out there that will disagree strongly with that point, but we’ll save that for another post. The management piece for Xen works well, can be loaded on any network node and allows for management of all your servers in one location. This is powerful. The other benefits that I mentioned earlier are the obvious ones that salesmen love to sell and management loves to hear: power, cooling, DR, etc.

DR definitely warrants a mention. Virtualization with shared storage, where your key servers become truly portable. The capability is inherent to allow live synchronization between shared storage from your live site to your DR site, and in the event of a disaster to simply spin up your virtual servers and continue. Very smooth, very powerful!

P2V… Pretty sure there’s been reams written on this topic already, with reams to come. I’ve had good success with Citrix’s XenConvert 1.0, and can’t wait to see their next version.

In my opinion I only see more powerful, complete solutions offered by more software companies on the virtual horizon.

Daniel Kaupp