Turbocharging Virtualization

As solution providers start migrating customer infrastructure to virtual environments, they are discovering that the promises tell only half the story. Virtual environments have their own set of challenges that require attention. It is easy for the costs of managing virtual servers to spiral out of control. Virtualization has reached a point where it's having some growing pains, according to Ken Klapproth, vice president of marketing at Entuity Ltd., Marlborough, Mass. "Do I hop more on board or jump off?" he said.

Some concerns don't go away just because the physical servers have. There are still questions about security, management, maintenance, audits, optimization and availability. In fact, these concerns are even more complicated in the virtual environment because there are multiple layers to focus on: the actual physical server host, the base operating system, the physical network, the virtual platform, the individual machines, the guest system's operating system, the virtual network and the various applications running on each machine.

The Test Center evaluated some applications from a variety of vendors to assess the tools available for an existing virtual environment. Each product varied in its area of focus, looking at management, data backup and recovery, and networking. For example, Sun Microsystems Inc., Santa Clara, Calif., offers the Sun xVM Ops Center to manage multiple virtual machines. Belfast, Northern Ireland-based Replify Ltd.'s Reptor Accelerator is a WAN optimization application, and Toronto-based Uptime Software Inc.'s Uptime 5 handles network monitoring. Finally, Cupertino, Calif.-based Symantec Corp.'s Backup Exec 12.5 and Backup Exec System Recovery 8.5 provide data backup and recovery for virtual machines.

Sun xVM Ops Center 2.0
Part of Sun's xVM portfolio, which includes VirtualBox, Server and VDI, the Ops Center is the management framework that takes care of all the virtual machines as well as the physical server. While xVM is a family of products specifically for the x86 platform, Sun's Ops Center supports both x86 64-bit systems and SPARC-based systems. Ops Center allows solution providers to manage the virtual machine, firmware, underlying operating system and the applications running on the virtual machine from a single user interface.

Through xVM Ops Center, solution providers have access to four types of tools to manage virtual systems: discovery, provisioning, updates and management.

When Ops Center discovers and registers virtual systems, it collects information about the system's architecture, hardware, operating system and running applications. It also collects information about the physical server host's hardware and makes the information available in the dashboard. The discovered systems can be organized in logical categories that may not match the actual data center. A relational topology map also is available to show the relationships between guest, network, storage and image systems. For large data centers, and especially for distributed data centers, auto-discovery and being able to view the hardware information in a single view is very powerful and helpful.

Sun xVM Ops Center automatically monitors all the assets and handles upgrades and patches for both the underlying operating system and the virtual system's operating system.The Linux and Solaris instances remain current, improving the system's security and stability. The multiplatform support is most evident here, as Ops Center can patch operating systems within Zone and LDom, Sun's SPARC-based virtualization technologies, as well as for the xVM virtual machines. The Ops Center can also provision the virtual machines, regardless of whether they are running Windows, Linux or Solaris.

Ops Center allows updates and related dependencies to be installed in a simulation to see what the effects would be before actually making the changes.

Finally, Ops Center includes extensive reporting for IT compliance, inventory management and trend analysis on historical data such as power consumption and memory and CPU utilization. It can perform resource optimization to minimize bottlenecks, track each virtual system's status and has migration capabilities.

Sun xVM Ops Center is available as a free download, but commercial subscriptions that include support and services start at $100 per managed server. There are other types of subscriptions, depending on the type of support required.

Next: Replify Reptor Accelerator 2.1.1