San Francisco – An anecdote presented by VMware Inc. CTO Stephen Herrod here at VMworld 2009, the virtualization software provider’s annual customer and partner conference, suggests that in the near future, when data centre operators go hunting for the cause of a performance issue, they won’t bother looking at the network – they’ll turn straight to the virtualization layer.
Recalling a conversation he had with a network technologist, Herrod said his correspondent noted that virtualization could become “the new whipping boy of the data centre.... The new thing always gets the blame.”
Of course, VMware and its partners are doing all they can to make virtualization anything but the most likely suspect in data centre issue hunts. Herrod talked up VMware AppSpeed, a new virtualization management tool, as an example. A member of VMware’s vCenter product family – vCenter is the firm’s virtualization management console – AppSpeed promises to give data centre administrators visibility into and service-level reporting capabilities for applications running in virtual environments.
The program provides a new level of application awareness, connecting physical and virtual data centre elements better so it’s easier to discover if performance issues really are the virtualization layer’s fault, or if they result from the hardware layer. “The ultimate goal is to give more visibility to the administrator...and fix it before the user even knows it’s there,” Herrod said.
He also opined that AppSpeed would operate as a stepping stone towards improved virtualization automation – a vision that would allow end-user organizations to introduce new applications without having to consult or consider the data centre.
