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May 16, 2008
• Vol.30 Issue 20
Page(s) 25 in print issue
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Managing “Hybrid” Virtualization Environments
How To Find The Right Balance Between Physical & Virtual Infrastructure
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So much buzz has surrounded virtualization that the reality of managing it within the enterprise has gotten lost. And most, if not all, enterprise networks using virtualization use it within a mixed environment of the physical and virtual.
Erik Josowitz, vice president of product strategy at virtual lab applications provider Surgient (surgient.com), says that many IT people mistakenly believe that virtual machines are just like physical machines.
“They think all the same skills they’ve developed over the years in terms of managing physical infrastructure in the corporate environment are necessarily going to apply,” says Josowitz. “While they do to a certain extent, every new solution comes with a whole set of new problems, and virtualization is no exception.”
For his part, Nick Cavalancia, vice president of Windows management at network administration software provider ScriptLogic (www.scriptlogic.com), says that hybrid environments add a layer of complexity because IT administrators have the capability to move their end users from physical machines to virtual machines and back. “You have to figure out, ‘Well, do I need to differentiate between the two environments, and if so, how do I accomplish that?’”
 Have Consistency Across All Platforms
According to Cavalancia, user needs are exactly the same whether your environment is physical, virtual, or a hybrid of the two. “IT should just look at it as a medium to deliver the desktop to the user,” he says.
Cavalancia points out that your users don’t care what type of box is at their desks. It could be a traditional PC with a hard drive, operating system, and applications installed on it or a dumb terminal that connects him to a Citrix or terminal server session. Therefore, you need to manage your hybrid environment as a complete entity, at least in the way you deliver applications, configuration settings, patches, fixes, updates, and so forth.
Users do not differentiate between virtual and physical platforms. If they update Excel spreadsheets or type documents in Word, they need Microsoft Office across the board. You can’t just tell them that they can only access Office on the physical part or, for that matter, virtual portion of your desktop, says Cavalancia.
Plan For Appropriate Protocols
Hybrid environments are dynamic, ironically, because of the need for end-user consistency. Your CEO may be working in his office on Monday, in the conference room on Tuesday, and in Rome on Wednesday, and on all those days, he wants a copy of his work going to his secretary’s printer.
According to Cavalancia, you need to put a methodology of also being able to differentiate between the environments so that you can balance your users’ needs of having seamless access with your needs to secure and ensure the functionalities of these environments.
Look Beyond Virtualization Vendors
“This isn’t a knock against any vendor, but it makes sense that virtualization vendors like Citrix, VMware, and Microsoft are not going to promote their competition’s virtual management platform,” says Cavalancia. “It makes for a convoluted environment.”
Because no clear-cut standards currently exist, it’s hard to come up with a cohesive solution to managing your different physical and virtual environments. “It becomes that much more complex because we need to use Thinstall [from VMware] for one thing and Citrix for another—and that’s just on the virtual end,” Cavalancia says.
Support Testing & Deployment
Surgient’s Josowitz explains that because the production application environment isn’t completely virtualized, you want to be able to see how a mixed environment will work before you deploy it. And that means having an infrastructure that can simulate a potential configuration so that you work out all the kinks ahead of time.
For example, you might want to replicate an Exchange Server 2007 configuration, and while some of the components play very nicely in a virtualized environment, you might want to keep your Exchange database installed on a physical system. Or, if you decide to use a virtual database, you might want to move it to a different physical location over time. Therefore, you want to develop a comprehensive management approach so that you can eliminate or at least minimize your challenges and focus on more important things, says Josowitz. 
by Robyn Weisman
Three Tips For Finding The Right Management Tools
According to Surgient (surgient.com) Vice President Erik Josowitz, there are many virtualization management tools from which to choose. However, not all of them offer transparent support for hybrid environments, which increases the risk of virtual machine sprawl. (This is ironic when you realize that one reason why virtualization is appealing is because it helps limit physical machine sprawl.)
Josowitz offers the following three tips for choosing a good management tool for your hybrid environment:
• Look for a management tool that can accommodate multiple types of virtualization and physical systems. According to Josowitz, this tool needs to understand there are physical machines in your environment, some of which have virtual machines on them.
• Make sure that the tool can also manage complex network configurations of VMs. “You need to replicate not just the machine configurations themselves but also the network configurations, and [the right management tool] must be able to actually replicate real configurations that are in production, not just simplified versions of those configurations,” Josowitz says.
• Make sure that it can actually offer some insight into what’s in the virtual machines themselves to avoid VM sprawl. Josowitz says that VMs tend to be large files, with an individual configuration taking up half a terabyte of storage. “All of a sudden you’re talking about real money in terms of your network storage. Those [virtual machine] files are black boxes, and so you don’t know what’s in those files until you actually launch them” without the right tool to control and manage them, says Josowitz. |
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