Storage and networking are very important. Some of the core capabilities that VMware brings to the table -- in terms of zero-downtime maintenance, using VMotion, distributed resource scheduling [and] high availability -- require a shared storage infrastructure, so storage is extremely important.
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| About the author |
| Rod Lucero is chief technical officer of St. Paul, Minn.-based VAR VMPowered. Listen to the rest of Rod's answers on VMware by downloading our VMware podcast. |
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Networking is hugely important, too, because we run quite a bit of networking in and out of these ESX servers from the actual virtual machine networking traffic. [With] the management that goes on within a virtual infrastructure, in the SCSI space, we're relying on that same network infrastructure, so strong storage and networking skills are essential for a company to be successful with a virtual infrastructure.
VMware purchased Dunes for a reason last year. Virtualization in the x86 world has created some new problems, specifically VMware sprawl, so management is a very important facet to a virtual infrastructure -- keeping our arms around who's doing what, where, when; where our virtual machines are coming from; where they are going. Each virtual machine takes up some resources, so it's important that we know what we're doing with our virtual machines -- who's creating them, when they're creating them, when they're deleting them and whether they're deleting them properly. It's the core infrastructure -- storage [and] networking -- but management is absolutely paramount.
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