Sunday evening, many of the vExpert award recipients converged in the Casanova 503 room at the Venetian for the VMworld 2011 vExpert meeting. Mingling, meeting, and networking was fantastic.
However, there was one topic of significant discussion that really got my wheel spinning. While we were requested not to go into detail into what was said by VMware (proper), we all are familiar with the concept… the Virtual Datacenter.
It should be no surprise that VMware has been walking us down the path of virtualizing our datacenter components. Servers, storage, networking… the entire stack. All in an effort to create this nebulous “Virtual Datacenter”. But, what is the virtual datacenter and how do we get there? Well… if I had the answer, I would probably be working for VMware… right?!
Conceptually, the virtual datacenter is being comprised of increasingly more and more commoditized resources. x86 compute resources are readily available with minimal cost. Auto-tiering storage is becoming more and more prevalent to help mitigate IO performance. 10Gb networking, and other high-bandwidth connections, are providing the ever-so-necessary connection to networking and network-based storage. By abstracting these resources, the virtual administrator is no longer tasked with management of these resources.
The fact of the matter, though, is that in many environments, management of these resources still exists. We need the network guys to maintain the network, the storage guys to handle the storage, and the server guys to handle the server hardware and connections to systemic resources.
Fact of the matter is that the virtual datacenter still needs management from different facets of the IT house.
My view of the virtual datacenter is creation of a system where network, storage, and servers are all managed at a single point. We are seeing this come to fruition in the Cisco UCS, vBlock, and other single SKU solutions. That is a fantastic model. However, it targets a different market.
My dream virtual datacenter manages everything itself.
- Need more storage, just add a hard drive. The datacenter handles data management and availability. Seriously, just walk over and add a hard drive or add another storage node to the rack.
- Need more network bandwidth, hot-add more pNICs. The datacenter handles properly spreading the data across available links, NIC failures, etc…
- Need more compute resources, add a new server to the rack. The datacenter handles joining the server to the available compute resources.
- Need external resources, just point the datacenter towards a public provider and let the datacenter manage the resources.
Creating the foundation to make this work relies on all parties involved allowing the datacenter to configure and manage everything. Storage vendors need to allow the datacenter to handle array configurations and management. Network vendors need to allow the datacenter to configure trunks, link aggregation, bandwidth control, etc… Systems vendors need to allow the datacenter to jump into the boot process, grab the hardware, and auto configuration.
Pie in the sky, right? Existing technologies seem to elude to more elegant management that would lend itself kindly to such a model. VMware, as the datacenter enabler, would need to step up to the plate and take the initiative and ownership of managing those resources… from RAID configurations to VLAN Trunking on switches.
Seriously… walking up and adding new physical resources or extending to a public provider for more resources and they become magically available would be fantastic.
So… that is my vision for where I would like to see the virtual datacenter. VMware, let me know if you want to talk about this in more detail. I am sure we can work something out!
