#virtualization #VDI #SDN Multiple goals = multiple
hypervisors. This complicates things a bit, doesn't it?
It
is quite difficult to find any environment that is truly homogeneous today.
Even home networks, which at one time may have been "all Windows" or
"all Linux" today are a mixture of mobile device, Apple, and
Windows-based products. As networks grow, the heterogeneity of its
infrastructure increases, with a variety of switches, servers, and platforms
adding to the mix of end-user computing devices.
Virtualization is no different. As
the uses for virtualization technology continue to expand to various
application functions, the heterogeneity of the virtual platforms used is also
growing. The 2013
Virtualization Management Survey from
Information Week indicated over a third of respondents have more than one
hypervisor in use today. In the next two years that number is expected to
increase to nearly half of all organizations leveraging multiple hypervisor
technology.
The
reasons for that divergence are varied, the same survey shows. Some organizations
use different virtualization vendors for server virtualization than they do for
desktop. Others cite hardware compatibility for legacy hardware as a reason for
using multiple hypervisors and so on.
Whatever
the reason, the trend seems clear: heterogeneous virtualization is increasing,
and eventually that divergence will have an impact on network infrastructure.
AGNOSTIC INFRASTRUCTURE
With multiple hypervisors in use, it
is increasingly important that the network infrastructure is equally capable of
providing the appropriate services for all hypervisors in use. This is
particularly true as we begin to see an increase in adoption of SDN-related
protocols such as NVGRE and VXLAN to virtualize the network. Protocol
incompatibilities will become problematic for organizations attempting to
leverage such technology in conjunction with multiple hypervisors due to a lack
of ubiquitous support. Either organizations must standardize across
inter-dependent and integrated services to ensure compatibility at the network layer or they must plan to put
into place protocol transition capabilities in the network itself, much in the
same way "gateways" are used within IPv4 to IPv6 transitional
architectures.
Too,
virtualization of the network through SDN-related protocols will be primarily
confined to within the data center. Users accessing those services will not be
doing so using these protocols, making the two networks nearly incompatible. A
bridge between the traditional and virtual networks must exist, and it must be
agnostic to ensure seamless communication.
Virtualized
solution architectures such as those associated with VDI that require specific
network infrastructure will also be trouble for organizations, as it limits
their ability to share the cost of infrastructure across multiple projects and
applications. Agnostic infrastructure, capable of providing equal levels of
delivery, security and availability to any IP-based application – including
those virtualized - will offer a more cost-effective and operationally
consistent approach to managing a heterogeneous virtual infrastructure.
What
would be detrimental to the adoption and advancement of virtualization in the
data center – whether in the application or network infrastructure – is to
create even more complex networks consisting of multiple paths that are
dependent on a given hypervisor and SDN-related technology. The disruption of
the network and application services should be kept to a minimum and the
network architecture kept as simple as possible to avoid the introduction of
additional (and unnecessary) points of failure.
By
leveraging a strategic point of control within the network with agnostic
infrastructure capable of being a bridge not only between traditional and
virtual networks but also between competing virtual network implementations
will eliminate complexity while offering the operational consistency that
reduces both cost and risks.
Fragmentation
of virtualization in the application infrastructure should not result in
fragmentation of the network.
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