Comments on: Networking virtual servers: A long way to go

Not to be a party pooper, but it seems a lot of the industry talk about cloud computing and server virtualization is glossing over some very real obstacles.

[MrJosh]

Well said, its a fascinating idea, but as with all things bleeding edge, we'll see a good deal of nicked fingers before the technology matures to the level marketing would like the masses to believe it has. I for one have been working on the VM side of networking for only a few short months really. The possibilities are as endless as the problems that arise from it. Here's hoping it comes along fast though, because as an industry we are going to be dealing with it on the behalf of clients now, whether or not its ready at the moment. Such is the fate of any industry driven by a market.

[jabberwolf]

This is exactly what we are running into.
And its not just 1 flavor but imagine having some vmware, some hyper-V (microsoft) and some on a SAN.
HP insight has done a great job but thats only if you are sticking with their hardware.

Its not really technology or 1 or 2 points of management, that's been licked. Its really instituting policy and procedures to ensure you can manage them correctly. And yes, there should be a better product for testing network I/O for servers, as sometimes I agree that I'm flying blindly and trusting that these new apps are telling me the truth.

[rapier1]

You mean putting 10 critical servers behind a single ethernet port doesn't provide you with a whole lot of redundancy? Surely you jest!

[lennyrvi]

Tools for virtual infrastructure performance optimization are now viable. One of the biggest problems users run into when deploying larger-scale virtualization projects is I/O performance. Understanding how a transaction being processed from one VM on an ESX server relates to a virtualized SAN infrastructure is very complex and extremely hard to debug when performance slows to a crawl. Without the right tools, understanding what is happening on the SAN is impossible. Check out www.virtualinstruments.com to see one approach to this problem that is being deployed by dozens of F500 accounts to solve this problem. Virtual Instruments does not solve all of the virtualization management problems, but for anyone concerned about performance of virtualized applications, it's worth a look.