Master of Your Virtual IT Universe: Trust, But Verify at Any Scale

A Neverending IT Journey around Optimizing, Automating, and Reporting on Your Virtual Data Center

Introduction

The journey of one begins with a single virtual machine (VM) on a host. The solitary instance in a virtual universe with the vastness of the data center as a mere dream in the background. By itself, the VM is just a one-to-one representation of its physical instantiation. But virtualized, it has evolved, becoming software defined and abstracted. It’s able to draw upon a larger pool of resources should its host be added to a cluster. With that transformation, it becomes more available, more scalable, and more adaptable for the application that it is supporting.

The software abstraction enabled by virtualization provides the ability to quickly scale across many axes without scaling their overall physical footprint. The skills required to do this efficiently and effectively are encompassed by optimization, automation, and report. The last skill is key because IT professionals cannot save their virtual data center if no one listens to and seeks to understand them. Moreover, the former two skills are complementary. And as always, actions speak louder than words.

In the following weeks, I will cover practical examples of optimization, automation, and reporting in the virtual data center. Next week will cover optimization in the virtual data center. The week after will follow with automation. And the final week will discuss reporting. In this case, order does matter. Automation without optimization consideration will lead to work being done that serves no business-justified purpose. Optimization and automation without reporting will lead to insufficient credit for the work done right, as well as misinforming decision makers of the proper course of actions to take.

I hope you’ll join me for this journey into the virtual IT universe.