Enabling Single-Pane-of-Glass Management
Virtualization does not have to change the way that you manage your datacenter. It
would be possible to carry on managing each operating system instance, deploying
each instance by booting to an ISO, but you are not getting the most from the
technologies available and are making life far harder than it needs to be.
One of the biggest changes that virtualization introduces to the datacenter initially is
the way you provision new servers. Instead of installing operating systems via an ISO
file, you use virtual machine templates that can include customizations, join a domain
automatically, and install applications and run scripts. Most likely you will have a few
virtual hard disks that can be used by many different templates that can be tailored for
the exact needs of the organization.
The longer-term goal is to shift from creating virtual machines to deploying instances
of services that are made up of many virtual machines and service templates. Using
service templates is a big change in the way services and virtual machines are
provisioned. The benefits they bring—such as easy deployment, updating of deployed
instances by updating the template, server application virtualization, and automated
configuration of network hardware—make the use of service templates something that
should be a goal. This is not to say that normal virtual machines will never be
deployed. Service templates are great to enable the deployment of services within an
organization, but there will always be those applications that just need to be deployed
once, and often the additional work in creating a service template does not make
sense.
What is important, though, is that you don’t end up with two completely different
management solutions or even potentially more:
One management solution for virtual machines
One management solution for physical machines
One management solution for the virtual infrastructure, such as the hypervisor
One management solution for the public cloud resources, such as Window Azure
IaaS virtual machinesThe goal is to manage your environment as simply and with as few tools as possible.
Look for management solutions that enable complete management without having to
put in lots of point solutions for different aspects of your datacenter. Patching is a
great example: there are solutions that will patch just virtual machines, and there are
different solutions to patch hypervisors, and other solutions for patching desktops. A
solution such as System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) will provide patching
for all servers, physical or virtual, and your desktops. Also, with Hyper-V, because it’s
part of Windows, SCCM can patch the hypervisor itself. One solution is to patch
everything. SCCM can also integrate with many third parties to be able to apply