Datacentre network virtualisation — the final frontier

Recognising that having hundreds of servers running at five percent utilisation is a waste, virtualisation has become a key driver for energy efficiency as well significantly reducing organisations’ IT infrastructure spend. Multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) can be created in a single physical platform greatly increasing the efficiency of the data centers by enabling more work from less hardware.
As the workload on the physical servers increases, VMs can be migrated to available servers to ensure that service level agreements and response times are met. When workloads decrease, the VMs can be migrated back to consolidate them back to fewer servers, allowing the unused servers to be powered down to save energy and cost.
Virtualisation can also improve the availability of applications, because Virtual Machines can quickly be restarted on new hardware when physical servers fail. VMs can be simply migrated ahead of time when servers need to be shut down for service or upgrades.
Complexity
However the increase in virtualisation comes at the price of additional complexity and overhead. Current networking switches are not aware of Virtual Machines and this exposes the risk of service outage and security breaches due to incorrect network configuration preventing virtualisation from reaching full potential in creating cloud and dynamic datacentres.
To truly exploit the benefits of server virtualisation, datacentres need to enable the dynamic and automatic movement of Virtual Machines while protecting their security and maintaining accessibility.
Current networking switches are not aware of Virtual Machines and this creates issues for both server and network administrators as they try to fully exploit the value of virtualisation and manage this new environment.
Thus, a more complete virtualisation approach is needed in order to take full advantage of server virtualisation. That means that one must look at it from a global point of view and be fully committed, since, if limited to just the servers, only half of the benefits of virtualisation are realised.