VMware Infrastructure products provide the next generation virtual platform for the new data center, but they don't virtualize the network or application delivery. F5 BIG-IP LTM works with VMware to provide truly virtualized Application Delivery Networking.
F5 White Paper
VMware DRS: Why You Still Need
Assured Application Delivery and
Application Delivery Networking
VMware Infrastructure products provide the next generation virtual platform for the new data center, but they don't virtualize the network or application delivery. F5 BIG-IP LTM works with VMware to provide truly virtualized Application Delivery Networking.
by Alan Murphy Technical Marketing Manager, VirtualizationWhite Paper VMware DRS: Why You Still Need Assured Application Delivery and Application Delivery Networking
Contents
Virtual Machine Mobility 3
Elastic Data Center Limitations-Scaling the Cloud 4 DRS-Where's the Network? 4 Network Virtualization 5 Application Awareness 5 Resource Offloading 6 Connection Management 6
Conclusion 7
2White Paper VMware DRS: Why You Still Need Assured Application Delivery and Application Delivery Networking
Virtual Machine Mobility
Virtual Operating Systems, or virtual machines (VMs) as we've come to know them, started out as isolated containers forced to run on individual physical machines. These physical machines were usually desktop devices, and virtual machines enabled desktop users to run multiple operating systems locally. This was a great technology for trying out different operating systems, testing new deployments, and even adhering to corporate IT policy while running another OS. These technologies were limited in data center adoption, however, due to their explicit requirement of VM location. Once installed and running on a particular physical machine, a VM had to stay on that machine unless it was powered down and manually moved to another physical machine and spun back up. And due to their resource consumption, running many virtual machines on one physical machine in the data center didn't scale as well as expected. Ultimately, this became more expensive to support and deploy than it saved in capital costs.
Fast forward five years and the virtual machine landscape is quite a bit different and much more advanced. Products were developed and released-such as VMware ESX and VirtualCenter-that have moved virtual machines from the desktop to the data center and decoupled the physical requirement of running a virtual machine and virtual disk (VMDK) on singular physical hardware. In addition, it is now the standard to physically separate and remove the computing portion of the virtual machine (CPU, RAM, I/O) from the virtual disk image; the running machine is hosted on a standard server while the virtual disk is stored on some type of shared storage and delivered as needed to the virtual machine via the storage network. Due to these architectural changes it is now possible, and extremely easy, to move running virtual machines between hosts without worrying about the physical disk image or losing state information. Further advances in VM mobility technology enable the same migration to occur with the virtual disk without impacting the running instance of the image. A VMDK file can be moved from one storage disk to another while the virtual machine continues to run uninterrupted on a single host. VMware has led the virtual pack in bringing products to market that facilitate and manage virtual infrastructure migration, however these products focus solely on virtual machines and disks. Like many other virtualization technologies in the data center they remain in silos, ignoring issues such as the network and end-user experience.
33White Paper VMware DRS: Why You Still Need Assured Application Delivery and Application Delivery Networking
Elastic Data Center Limitations-
Scaling the Cloud
By creating a near-complete replica of the physical data center on top of virtual platforms, VMware has revolutionized the role of virtualization in the data center and opened the door for what many people are calling the New Data Center. Like all revolutionary changes though, VMware does expose some major limitations in how virtualization is managed with other technologies in the data center.
DRS-Where's the Network?
One of the critical feature functions lacking from VMware products such as DRS and HA is factoring in network-based information as part of resource-scaling decisions. As DRS and HA monitor VM performance across multiple hosts, they are only monitoring what are known as computing resources: CPU and RAM. These two fa... [download for more]
