Virtualization of Data Center and Management Overhead

Virtualization of Data Center and Management Overhead is topic that should be considered by any Company starting a new business. Server virtualization has gave the opportunity to use more virtual machines per server in the data center reaching even to hundreds using the technology of multi-core CPUs and many bigger brands are offering Cloud Computing capable Data Center in lease basis. There are many articles published before on what to check before to such business to take the lease and enter the new business, in this article the major matter of discussion is – Virtualization of Data Center and Management Overhead.

Virtualization of Data Center and Management Overhead : The Technical Aspects

Consequently, the processing of functions such as decisions for routing, encryption has increased exponentially. As networked systems with discrete performance may not scale cost effectively to meet this request processing on the rise, we need to implement changes to the network.

The network functions that are implemented in software and hypervisor in the network are not much efficient for various reasons. The routing control is needed for making x86 machines to be scaled in some way. For example think of a data center with 1000 servers, with 21 to 48 port switch for each and an overhead traffic management of 1 per cent. If  Virtualization of the data center with 4 virtual machines per CPU core, having 32 cores per server is done, then we will get a total of 128 virtual machines per server and 128,000 distinct virtual machines across the data center. With these assumptions the increase headache of management of traffic compared to the non-virtualized solution is approximately 32 times higher, this can be calculated easily with a simple scientific calculator.

Virtualization of Data Center and Management Overhead : Additional Points

Support for the migration of virtual machines between servers within a server cluster or multiple clusters, creates additional complexity and management overhead. IT administrators may choose to move a VM from one server to another for various reasons including availability of resources, maintenance and failures of hardware or software network. The hypervisor manages these migration scenarios, but actually the process is not so simple from management in real life.

Because of the higher cost involved in the construction and implementation of data centers, many organizations are moving towards multi-tenant model, where different companies share a common infrastructure of virtualized resources. Data protection and security are critical needs in multi-tenant environments, which require logical isolation of resources without dedicating physical resources to a customer. These are the basic reasons to think about virtualization of Data Center and management overhead.