subject: Virtualized Data Storage Solutions Asia: Offsetting Technical Issues [print this page] . Savings in physical real estate, power, cooling, and maintenance as well as the opportunity to sell off unneeded physical servers is what has drawn many companies into the virtualization club.
As is always the way with new technology though, technical problems consistently arise in response to new uses. Today we are looking at some common problems encountered in virtual network performance management, and how information technology consultants are overcoming them.
Application performance
Virtualization offers the chance to greatly improve information flows within the server environment. However, the fact that capacity and application performance is no longer linked to the infrastructure itself means that performance is a potential challenge for network performance monitors. Performance base lining is used as an Asian communications solution to make sure that the architectural changes that have taken place don't end up causing bottlenecks.
Better physical resource utilization might be able to be seen across most of the system, but if a bottleneck occurs, the end user will see no benefit.
Active testing and passive observation should be engaged in on an ongoing basis, also.
Capacity management
With the ability to have 'on-demand computing', especially in cloud-based service architectures, creates a sort of explosion in capacity utilization. Modeling and provisioning of the anticipated event must be done in advance by Asian network infrastructure experts for effective management.
Availability
In a physical server environment, if one piece of information technology infrastructure failed, the impacts were fairly localized. Availability, as it relates to a single piece of hardware, is much more critical in a virtual environment. The key to maintaining availability in this arena is having the tools and processes to quickly identify any problems and solve them. Deep packet application aware inspection tools as well as integrated element managers are commonly recommended by Asian network operations managers.
License management and compliance
If necessary, companies should get in touch with their software providers to establish how their license agreement terms will be affected. A Right-to-Use agreement may quickly be breached by multiple virtual machines using an application at the same time, circumventing license locking mechanisms within the product. Applications may not even be licensed to run on a virtual information technology infrastructure, and in some cases such a license is not available.
Security
Tracking and auditing access to virtual hard disks becomes critical for maintaining internal security, as Asian IT security consulting firms have discovered. Virtual hard disks can easily be copied to removable media and taken away from the building without detection. Segmenting resources is an additional necessary practice, as is keeping internet-facing servers away from corporate facing servers.
