Five virtualisation challenges impacting IT pros and data centre management

With the software defined data centre transition an imminent reality, the following five management challenges should be on every IT pro’s radar in preparation:

1. Virtual Mobility Impacts Network Optimisation – Virtualisation has typically operated within a contained portion of the network such that changes in the virtualisation environment didn’t usually impact the broader network. With improvements and increased adoption of workload mobility technologies like Metro vMotion and storage vMotion that make it easier to move workloads geographically, the rapid movement of workloads could cause new problems for the overall enterprise network.

2. Storage Tries to Keep Up with Virtual Mobility & Software-Defined Networks – Just like virtual mobility can impact networks, if both compute and networks become more software-defined and flexible then storage can get left behind. Advanced planning and technology investments will be required for storage to make sure that the storage systems can handle the mobility enabled by server virtualisation and software-defined networking.

3. The Virtual I/O Blender Becomes Mission Critical – Storage I/O has been a limiting factor for virtualising many I/O intensive applications like databases. With technologies like solid state disk (SSD) opening the door to many of these mission critical applications, failures in performance and capacity management will have an even greater impact on the business and end users. Further, IOPS demand created by desktop virtualisation can be significantly different than server virtualisation, requiring more low-latency, and usually more expensive hardware.

4. Application Control Meets Real-time Automation – Most failures are caused by something changing. As a result, applications teams have traditionally put very tight controls on changes to mission critical application systems. Virtualisation and automation on the other hand, make it very fast and easy to create new systems or make changes to existing systems or even entire clusters of systems and application stacks. These two cultures will have to find ways to leverage the power and flexibility of virtualisation without introducing instability into critical virtualised applications.

5. Virtualisation Reaches Across Silos – Network, storage, applications, and compute all come together at the virtualisation layer. While server virtualisation is by far the most mature component of a software defined data centre, the next challenge will be to look outside the compute boundaries to figure out how to best manage and coordinate changes/actions with other technology areas. As the pace of change increases across all the interrelated technology, the IT professionals managing the virtualisation layer will increasingly have to be the coordinating “glue” to keep other teams aligned.