by Patrick Ancipink

There’s been a lot of discussion this week at Symposium about dealing with the daily realities of virtualization. The issues cut across technology and politics and the cost savings from virtualized servers basically guarantee continued virtual machine (VM) adoption and sprawl.

Perhaps the most colorful statement I heard was from a network engineer characterizing how the server and application teams approached him on provisioning more VMs: “Just give me an IP address and stop asking questions.”

Ay caramba!

In some organizations it seems the cost savings of VMs are being used as a blunt instrument to justify rapid VM provisioning and throw process and performance implications aside. The risks of unpleasant surprises and painful performance degradation seem to be rising in parallel with VM growth that eschews planning and testing. After some discussion about the Wild West of VM sprawl that some of our customers are experiencing, a network engineer reflected back on our astronaut’s keynote: “How can we work the plan when there is no plan?”

Luckily we heard some better news in a keynote this morning from George Kurian, VP and GM for Cisco’s Application Delivery Business Unit. It always warms my NetQoS heart to listen to George describe why visibility and management are mandatory components of optimizing the application delivery network, and it was reassuring to hear about what Cisco is doing to address the complexity and headaches of virtualization sprawl.

Specifically, providing “fiber channel over Ethernet” promises to deliver a “lossless fabric” and denser switches and servers can cut in half the amount of network connections you have to manage in the virtual data center. With this type of simplification and efficiency--and the attendant savings in power and cabling and labor—virtualization can scale more gracefully than it does today. Working with standards groups to keep the virtual stack as open as possible sounds like the right path. (I know, I know, standards groups have a pretty poor track record in networking and management, but in this situation I think it’s a better approach than building a brittle, more proprietary stack that inhibits flexibility.)

George talked about some cool new stuff like Priority Flow Control and Virtual Network Link coming in the Nexus product line, but I can’t really do justice to it and you can read about that on your own.

Now, where’s the IP address I asked for?