Earlier this week, Network World Senior editor Denise Dubie published a very insightful article, “How far has virtualization come?“. In it, she reviews the results of three annual surveys conducted at Interop, all focused on virtualization technology deployments and adoption in the data center.

The survey, which was conducted by Network Instruments the past two years (NetQoS and NI conducted it together in 2008), revealed some very interesting data points.

1. Virtualization, as we would have anticipated, has picked up a great deal of momentum both in the data center and on the desktop.
2. The primary reason for adopting virtualization is cost savings. Yet, they also revealed that implementation costs are too high.
3. The single biggest virtualization-related challenge is a lack of visibility to data streams, an inability to secure the infrastructure, and a lack of monitoring tools optimized for virtualized environments.

Based on the interplay of the first two key findings above, it is clear that high implementation cost is not a long-term problem. Obviously, today’s decision makers can see the “forest for the trees” so to say, in that the expected long-term cost savings will easily dwarf the high cost of entry.

What jumps out to me the most is the monitoring problem. This is not a unique challenge to virtualized environments, but rather, virtualization itself is causing some head-scratching regarding the monitoring itself. And really, for data centers that are already burdened with escalating tool costs, shrinking staffs, and a shortage of physical access points, it’s no wonder some of them might feel desperate to fix the monitoring quandary.

The reality of the situation is that there is a very easy answer to this problem: Monitoring Optimization. Monitoring optimization involves the adoption of an aggregation and replication switch, which can solve all of these problems if designed with a fully-integrated GUI. The key is to look at this as the monitoring of specific data flows or traffic, not specific links, switches, or access points.

With servers and other hardware switching over to “virtual” servers and hardware, one of the biggest issues is knowing where to place tools in the physical infrastructure. If you stick with the “old way” of placing a tool everywhere monitoring is required, you’ll need more tools than any reasonable enterprise can afford to buy or manage!

What you really need is a “virtual tool farm” to go with your virtual infrastructure. Don’t get me wrong; you’ll still be using the same hardware/software-based tools you have already deployed. But using Monitoring Optimization, you can extend a single tool to cover multiple data streams, and you can share traffic from a single data stream with any or all of the tools you desire. The best part is that you can do it all in a fully integrated GUI without ever having to use some time-intensive, cryptic IOS-like CLI (likely in a proprietary coding language from the vendor, as most of our competitors offer) to manage your most challenging filtering…it’s all drag and drop and windows-esque form entry.

If you count yourself among those who said monitoring is their biggest headache, I urge you to learn more about the Anue 5200 Series Net Tool Optimizer. Then reach out to us via our Contact Me form, and we’ll show you exactly how much easier this can be, and you will see a positive impact to your tool use and staff effort immediately upon deploying our solution.