Requirements

Managing Virtual Environments

Organizations deploying virtual technologies are learning that preserving existing management disciplines and processes while leveraging the benefits of virtualization presents major challenges. Organizations attempting to manage virtual environments like physical ones are learning that while they’ve lessened the impact on existing management processes, they are failing to realize the dramatic strategic benefits virtualization promises - such as agility and high availability. Employing traditional management approaches using lists, scripts and targeting is failing in virtualized environments. These approaches don’t work in these environments for a number of reasons:

• The targeting of systems that exist in multiple states, including stopped (offline), is problematic, since the agents targeting invokes don’t run when a machine is off or paused. This means targeting must be retried when the system is running, or operators must coerce the system into a running state - resulting in increased overhead and risk.
• Management agents running within a VM have little or no perspective of the virtual environment “outside” of the VM, such as the presence of snapshots, clones, or other VMs in the same host - causing a dangerous gap in management information.
• Templates, clones, and virtual machine snapshots all introduce operational complexity and accuracy issues for traditional approaches - introducing incorrect information which lead to management errors.
• The diversity of Virtual Appliances and customized VMs limit targeting, and introduce new platform support challenges for traditional agent-based management systems - limiting flexibility and choice.
• Management Agents on VMs are unaware of the dynamics of virtualization. That leads them to initiate management functions at inopportune times, such as during movement of the VM from one host to another - causing management and operational failures.