Virtualisation Server Management
Data centres are being squeezed by a variety of internal and external pressures such as power, HVAC, new servers, human errors, patching, asset tracking and more. In fact, the average data centre consumes enough power in a month to power 1,000 homes! On top of all this, you have to keep up with dynamically changing business requirements. You need a solution that will allow you to align IT to your business, control costs and minimize risks. Data centre managers are looking for a variety of ways to address these dilemmas. One of the key ways is server consolidation usually described as using virtualisation. Virtualisation of it's self, only changes one set of issues for a new collection, the real solution is integrated virtualisation AND management!
The Vision: Enterprise-class Management Capabilities for Commodity Scale-out Data Center Architectures
Automating the data centre for maximum resource utilization and flexibility has always been the goal for forward-thinking IT administrators. But as centralized mainframe environments have been replaced by heterogeneous hardware, operating systems, storage and other resources, the vision of a tidy, efficient, automated data centre has dimmed.
On the Virtualization Front
Most virtualization in the data centre today focuses on creating a "sandbox" for application development, testing and deployment. Some companies are beginning to take virtualization a step further by repurposing machines to handle different workloads and consolidating hardware resources. But to turn virtualization into a powerful, flexible platform to host the infrastructure, the industry will need to create tools for tying management of physical and virtual machines together.
In the near future, new, common, open virtualization formats from Xen, VMware and Microsoft will make it easier to migrate workloads across virtual machine hosts,with minimal modification.
With techniques such as virtualized computing, shared storage and distributed resource management, administrators can simplify administration, maximize utilization, and assign resources dynamically to meet shifting workloads. But the means to commoditize these technologies and tie them together in an automated management framework was lacking-until now.
Now a single automated solution can manage virtual machines, identities, storage and systems in an coordinated and intelligent way according to workload requirements, hardware health and business policies. New innovations in virtualization, systems management standards and Novell technology are converging to make the vision a reality. Novell call the management Orchestration, we call the result Green Computing.
Novell technology makes it possible to repurpose virtual machines and migrate workloads on the fly, as well as in an integrated management model for both physical and virtual machines. The objective is to create an agile, policy-based Orchestration environment-an environment that automates and orchestrates management of identities, systems, storage and virtual machines.
An interesting wrinkle is that Novell has made provisions for reporting on this use and for billing for this use, so that billing departments for their CPU use is once again available.