PAGE 3

Automation: the secret sauce

To enable a truly fluid and optimized virtual environment, management-software makers not only have to expand their reach into multiple virtual domains but also integrate extensive automation technologies.

Ed Traylor, senior director of IT and technical operations at Redwood City, Calif.-based Care2, an online community for green living and social change, would like to share storage resources across virtual instances. In essence, he wants to create a virtual SAN by orchestrating the connection between virtual machines and local disks. The ability to provision virtual machines intelligently across multiple physical hosts would require a heterogeneous virtual-management system, he adds.

Traylor has a NetApp file-attached storage system and employs iSCSI to port Web-server virtual machines to the physical hosts. Should a physical host fail, his team can quickly resurrect a virtual machine on any given blade server. Care2 runs Fibre Channel via a redundant mesh to IBM BladeCenter servers that host the virtual database servers. Traylor uses IBM's Director systems-management software to provide predictive failure analysis, data collection and automated deployment updates. Work still needs to be done to fully manage and ultimately optimize such environments, he says.

"If we're being hypothetical, then a fair assessment would be that [virtual machines] would operate in scalable, self-aware clusters that provision themselves for specific applications based on demand - and all of this would happen completely without human interaction," Traylor says. "Tasks such as provisioning, load balancing and fault tolerance would be handled by the virtual machines' artificial intelligence. From an operational or engineering perspective, all you provide is bandwidth, content and electricity."

© 2007 Network World Inc.