Egenera has created a 13 page white paper detailing managing the virtual datacenter.
Overview:
The typical enterprise datacenter is filled with hundreds to thousands of underutilized servers and a mass of surrounding infrastructure. While processing technology has continued evolving to provide greater performance, legacy server architectures have resulted in a model of one server to one application. Virtualization is intended to increase CPU utilization and reduce datacenter complexity by abstracting compute resources from underlying hardware and network configurations. This will enable users to dynamically add compute, network, and storage resources to an application; move applications in real time; redirect workloads; and optimize server utilization and service levels.
Over the past several years, the use of virtual machine (VM) or hypervisor technology has become widespread on industry-standard servers as the means to securely consolidate numerous applications on a single box. Looking into the future, we can anticipate that those hundreds of servers will become thousands of virtual machines. While this will deliver benefits in terms of better server utilization, management of this complexity will become a critical issue. Egenera's Processing Area Network (PAN) architecture combined with best-of-breed hypervisors offers the ideal foundation for a highly available, easily managed, scalable and highly utilized datacenter environment.
Hypervisors and Egenera's PAN architecture provide complementary solutions to manage the virtual datacenter:
- Hypervisors provide processor virtualization, or the ability to logically sub-divide an individual server or blade. This allows multiple operating systems to run securely on the same CPU and increases CPU utilization, which is essential for enabling server consolidation and lower management costs.
- The PAN provides datacenter virtualization, or the ability to abstract CPU/memory resources from underlying hardware and network configurations. This enables processing resources to be pooled and dynamically assigned to applications based on business demands.
Traditional server architectures do not abstract CPU/memory from underlying hardware and network configurations. Therefore, hypervisors running on top of legacy server architectures must deal with complex and rigid server configurations and are unable to effectively manage network, SAN and management resources. This complexity will increase as the number of virtual machines running in the datacenter scales from hundreds to thousands.
The complexity of managing hypervisors within a legacy hardware architecture illustrates a point that many industry experts agree on--that a new computing architecture is needed. Egenera's PAN architecture was specifically designed to "unlock" processing and memory resources from the server and underlying network/SAN/management connectivity, thereby allowing them to be allocated to applications as needed.
The PAN provides a management platform that dramatically simplifies the administration of hypervisors, since it virtualizes all I/O within the PAN. The PAN creates virtual devices (e.g. disk) and virtual switches, moving all points of state and identity to an intelligent fabric switch. The PAN extends the benefits of hypervisor technology and maximizes the availability, scalability and manageability of hypervisors.
Hypervisors are managed at the PAN controller level, enabling VMs to be easily moved, scaled up/down, scaled out or failed over in a virtual environment. This allows hypervisors to take advantage of the PAN's inherent capabilities, including N+1 hardware failover, verifiable DR, I/O consolidation and simplified systems management. As a result, the PAN simplifies hypervisor management and provides dramatic savings in capital and operational expenses for hardware, software and network administration.
Download this free PDF white paper, here.