RSSAdventures in Managing Virtualization
Evan Jafa, CIO for First American, has already learned plenty about server virtualization during his data center revamp. But he says the greatest virtualization challenges for IT leaders are yet to come. Think process management, network provisioning, and IT organization makeovers.
Still, he says, he does face a wave of organizational questions, ones that he feels most IT leaders will also have to battle.
"Virtualization will start posing a serious challenge organizationally to IT," he says. "The current vertical disciplines that we have will not be appropriate." For example, he says, IT may need a horizontal group with members from various teams to handle provisioning.
How is his group dealing with this situation? "So far we haven't torn down the vertical organizations," Jafa says. "Through the architecture organization, we have brought those teams together." His IT team now has an overall architecture team that works on design, architecture and process questions, he says.
Process, he believes is key. Jafa, who was already a big fan of using ITIL to standardize IT process before he started the virtualization efforts, weaves ITL into his team's efforts in the physical and virtual worlds. Jafa says close to 55 percent of his team is ITIL-certified and he has a fulltime ITIL instructor in house.
"In the virtual world, processes become super critical," Jafa says. "We want to make sure to test our processes to see how they will do. For example, provisioning has to be constantly defined," he says.
"We just did a whole assessment of exactly what will the impact of virtualization be on our processes," he says. "We have to meld some of our processes for the virtual world," he says, noting network design and even software design has to change in the virtualized environment. "Now we can look at the long term impact."
On that networking front, Jafa is now working with Cisco to test out technologies such as Virtual Switching Systems (VSS) and VFrame (a family of provisioning and automation tools), in a quest to make his network more standardized and simpler to manage.
"Network provisioning becomes as critical as server provisioning," Jafa says. "We are very interested in virtualization of the LAN, so we don't have all these protocols for storage and fibre in the network. The simpler the protocols and the more collapsed the protocols are, the easier the virtualized world will be managed."
For more on what that means, see "The Virtualized Network of the Future."
"Virtualization of the LAN" is a concept that can mean different things to different people. The basic idea is the same as server virtualization: Take a single physical resource, like a LAN, and virtualize it in terms of resource sharing and simplified management.
If you have many separate LANs, you can use virtualization to consolidate them into one switch, notes Deepak Munjal, marketing manager of Cisco Data Center Solutions. You can also consolidate network services, such as firewalls and network load balancing. (For more details on this, see Cisco's description of its Virtual Switching System, or VSS.)
Looking ahead, vendors such as Cisco would like IT leaders to think about virtualizing the actual cables that come out of a server. Today, various cables including fibre channel interfaces to storage and Ethernet interfaces to management tools come out of physical servers. "You can start using new tools to collapse those protocols," onto two cables, a large link and one for redundancy, says Cisco's Munjal.
This is the idea behind Fibre Channel over Ethernet, an open industry standard that makes its Cisco debut in the recently released Nexus 5000, a 10 Gigabit Ethernet top-of-rack switch.
In Cisco's vision of the future, the benefits in a network design using switches like this one resemble the benefits of sever virtualization: less hardware to manage, reduced power and better utilization of hardware asset, and hopefully, simplified administration.
Keep in mind, Cisco just shipped that Nexus 5000 switch in early April and even forward-thinking IT leaders like Jafa are still in early test mode with such technologies, so it may be a while before you see large enterprise data centers actually revamping their network design.
© 2009 CXO Media Inc.
First American
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