Kusnetzky Group, Inc. today posted Visibility and Control are Inside Jobs, another position paper intended to review the forces changing the market for information technology in general and virtualization technology in specific. These position papers are written by the well known software analyst, Daniel Kusnetzky, who is now the Principal Analyst and President, Kusnetzky Group Inc.

Paper Overview

Current management architectures aren't able to deliver the types of control and visibility that are really needed in a virtualized environment. Management visibility and control are best Getting the complete picture of virtual server status and controlling all aspects of virtual server operations are best done from inside rather than externally accomplished as an inside job rather than by trying to surround the environment with a large framework of some sort.

There are several techniques that allow administrators to "see" what's happening inside of a running system including:

• Through the APIs. Relying on the APIs provided by the developers of the operating systems, hypervisors and application framework software is inherently limited to the exposed functionality and information.
• With an agent. By leveraging agent technologies, loaded into the application space within each system, much better visibility can be achieved than the limited APIs typically provide. Agents must surround all of the running software's APIs with instrumented "shims" that feed data to the external administrative system.
• With a low-level driver. Different from an agent, a driver can collect information without existing obtrusively on the system, as a quieter, smaller-footprint mechanism within the system.

This paper can be found on the Kusnetzky Group, Inc. website.

http://www.kusnetzky.net/publications/ImpactPapers/20071206_Visibility_and_control_are_inside_jobs.pdf