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The other side of a virtual world

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CIOL Bureau
New Update

Virtual machines have virtually engulfed the world around us, be it the hype and excitement with which they arrived, the cost and efficiency deliverables they have churned out or the many wrinkles of physical machines that they have smoothly ironed out. But while they continue to replace or complement the physical infrastructure in an organization, and solving the old-world problems, they are also generating a host of new problems that have started surfacing

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Basant Rajan, CTO, Symantec India, unfolds some challenges like sprawl, migration, storage et cetera around virtualization in this interview with Pratima Harigunani of CyberMedia News.

CMN: Why is virtual sprawl emerging as a concern?

Basant Rajan: While there has been a lot of hype around virtualization, proliferation of virtual machines (VMs) as an added layer on physical machines (PMs), is a factor to reckon with. Increased adoption of virtualization is causing this sprawl, as there is a tendency to create as many VMs since they do not have any physical cost. But there are intangible costs like lifecycle management, patching, tracking etc that have to be still dealt with. While VMs offer powerful capabilities to enterprises, they exacerbate the challenge of data center complexity. In addition to managing physical servers from multiple hardware vendors running multiple operating systems, enterprises must now also manage multiple VM platform choices running on each operating system.

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CMN: What are the problems that envelope VMs vis-à-vis PMs? Can you touch upon the main issues that are serious enough on the ground?

BR: There are many issues to address when it comes to VMs. One of them is managing the lifecycle of a VM. After being created, a VM has to migrate across servers depending upon the load and then have to be taken care of for termination and back-up as well. Migration is not an issue when it comes to physical machines. On the other hand, there are some issues like availability, disaster recovery and provisioning for storage that are equally applicable to both PMs and VMs. Also, migration necessitates mobile storage connectivity.

Another problem - Unlike a PM which when inactive, can be wrapped up and kept away in cold storage, a VM cannot be moth balled and forgotten.

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CMN: Weren’t these problems anticipated and taken into account while virtualization as a technology was being developed?

BR: No, because, everyone naturally saw the good side of the technology which is inarguably strong. Virtualization has definitely led to efficiency improvements. It is in fact, the increased adoption per se that has led to the problems. It is the same case as of growth of mobiles, the technology is nice, but increased and ubiquitous adoption leads to network jams. The success is engendering this new class of problems because they were not anticipated. Now we have to deal with them because the benefits of virtualization are worth in spite of the sprawl.

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CMN: Isn’t this a paradox? The very essence of virtualization as a technology was in the promise of its spread without costs?

BR: Yes, it is a paradox. Look at the way technology has evolved from mainframes to open systems to virtual systems on open infrastructure. We have no doubt, saved hardware but that has directed us to another league of problems, which have to be tackled now.

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CMN: Is sprawl in any way, an infrastructure issue?

BR: No. It is because of the sheer number of VMs that causes the cropping up of management issues. These are new issues that were never there with PMs as they can be easily mothballed or migrated away from physical servers. VMs have a lot more capability but that produces management issues. It’s a price we have to pay for what we derive from VMs.

CMN: What issues like these, if any, are popping up on the side of storage virtualization?

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BR: Every copy of a VM requires a copy of the operating system, which means identical files but takes twice the amount of storage. Hence, there is one issue of redundancy. We are working on VMWare storage where one main copy can be shared across VMs. It has been demonstrated and discussed at some customer meetings and the technology is underway. However, there is no roadmap so far on this side.

Secondly, VM migration means that application access storage happens on a different VM. Now for security reasons, we use SAN technology but VM migration calls for control on the zoning aspect. This has to be dealt with.

CMN: How has Symantec attacked these issues on virtualization from the perspective of its portfolio?

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BR: The accelerated adoption of virtualization technology represents a significant market opportunity for Symantec. First, Symantec offers a host of solutions that improve the manageability, functionality, and performance of individual virtual server environments, including VMware, XenSource and Solaris Containers & Logical Domains. On the side of server virtualization, we have extended the leadership on physical environments to virtual environments. Our Veritas suite is extended to virtual platform. Just as Veritas software products provide functionality for data protection, storage and server management and high availability across all major vendors of physical servers and their operating systems, Symantec’s Veritas products do the same across all major virtual machine platforms, as well.

Symantec has the ability to provide a single, common, unifying layer of infrastructure software that supports all major storage hardware platforms, databases, and physical and virtual servers to improve the availability, performance, and manageability of data centers. This capability spans across products like Veritas NetBackup, Veritas Cluster Server, Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas CommandCentral Storage, Symantec Backup Exec for Windows Servers and Symantec Backup Exec.

CMN: But is there any possibility of a fresh offering to address virtualization problems uniquely?

BR: No. People are used to legacy environments. We can’t ask them to forget PMs suddenly and cut over to VMs. This would mean lot of resistance from users. It is easier to extend PM investments so that there is no need to re-learn things while the incremental learning curve can be minimized. Hence, our product suite is enhanced to handle VMs with enhanced capabilities while retaining the look and feel of our products.

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