The Changing Face of IT Management in a Virtual World
The Changing Face of IT Management in a Virtual World
By David Dennis published: Monday, July 24 2006
by David Dennis, Director, Marketing & Products - Levanta
The primary reason people use virtual machines (VMs) today is to achieve portability and resource flexibility in commodity hardware environments. That is, being able to abstract what you’re running from the underlying hardware so you can throw out the commodity hardware wherever or whenever it’s needed. Creating this abstraction layer via VMs makes sense in today’s scale-out world, where real content is not on the host OS of the underlying hardware, but in the VM container.
This in contrast to the pattern several years ago, when VMs were used mainly for server consolidation on expensive, “big iron” hardware.
The paradigm shift in systems management is the notion of having the IP in a portable container, independent of commodity hardware. The challenge is decoupling that content and data from the machine it’s running on. This is where shared storage comes into play. Really valuable content (web site content, database, etc.) no longer sits on the server in any meaningful way, but rather is put on the back-end, in shared storage. In addition to the content, compute resources (i.e., web servers, rendering nodes, JBoss servers, etc.) also have to be decoupled from the hardware they’re running on – and that’s where enterprises are seeing the value in virtual machines today.
However, the reality is nobody is using just virtual machines in their environment.
Some reasons few production environments will become 100% virtualized any time soon (assuming current technology) are:
Virtualization is getting cheaper all the time, but is not yet free either in terms of price or adoption effort. This means it gets selectively deployed, instead of universally.
To squeeze maximum performance out of hardware for a particular application
For legacy, mission-critical systems, people are often reluctant to change what appears to be “working” by changing the environment. This includes moving to virtualization.
Clusters, grids, and other advanced technologies simply have little to be gained by being virtualized.
As a result, people are using VM’s in tandem with physical hardware…and that reality presents management challenges on a number of levels.
While XenSource has the Xen Optimizer to manage Xen, and VMware has VirtualCenter and VMotion -- neither can mange the other. In addition, neither can manage non-virtualized machines. And further complicating the matter, the management tools from the non-virtualized distributions are going to be different from how an organization will want to manage their VMs. Technologies like YaST, yum, and Red Hat Network can provide content for a virtual container, but do nothing for portability.
So the problem is, very few of the management approaches out there today take into account the idea that people will want to move their virtual machines around wherever they want to, or in some cases, flip between the virtual world and the physical world. The challenge is being able to move the virtual container from a rack to a blade to a box or from a development environment to a production environment.
Levanta subscribes to the same approach of using abstraction and virtualization to take advantage of new capabilities and speed compared to what’s gone before in Linux server management. Levanta takes a machine’s (virtual or physical) configuration and abstracts it so that it is portable and allows for the provisioning or migration of systems in minutes.
Levanta complements the portability provided by container technologies such as Xen and VMware so that system administrators can roll out systems and changes rapidly across a diverse heterogeneous hardware environment.
Levanta’s Linux management appliance, Intrepid M, is designed so that virtual machines are seen as just another machine on the network. This means companies can still manage all of their servers, native, VMWare, or Xen, from the same management interface.
As virtual machines have become commoditized, the real consideration revolves around server management of the entire Linux IT environment, both virtualized and non-virtualized. If a company spends a lot of time and money managing the environment, it negates the savings of the technology acquisition.
Tread carefully when bringing virtualization approaches into your Linux environment.
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About Levanta
Levanta is a leader in Linux management and data virtualization. Levanta's unique technology marries change control with data virtualization, delivering dramatically faster and more flexible control of Linux on commodity hardware, racks, blades, boxes, virtual machines, and even mainframes. Levanta's customers include industry leaders in financial services, entertainment, government, retail and telecommunications. Levanta has partnerships with IBM, HP, Novell, and Red Hat. A private company, Levanta is headquartered in San Mateo and can be found on the Web at http://www.levanta.com.
David Dennis
David Dennis brings close to 15 years of experience in enterprise software, systems management, and open source segments. Previously, Dennis served in senior product and technical marketing roles with HP OpenView, Mercury Interactive, and Symantec, as well as Kleiner-Perkins startup Centrata. Dennis is also a contributing author to IT publications such as LinuxWorld Magazine and Virtual Strategy Magazine.
Dennis holds a bachelor of science from Stanford University and is an alumnus of Anderson School of Management, UCLA.
