At its annual user conference, Opsware has revealed a
strategy for managing complex virtual server
environments.
During an opening keynote, Opsware chief executive officer Ben
Horowitz discussed what the company believes is the little
understood challenges of managing virtual servers. This complexity,
states the company, has arisen because of the rapid adoption of
server virtualisation and the accompanying rise in server ‘images’
to be managed. Opsware believes this has reached crisis proportions
as IT departments struggle to keep up with the dramatically
increased workload.
In his keynote, Horowitz stressed the value that automation can
deliver for environments virtualised with technologies such as
VMware, Microsoft Virtual Server, Sun Solaris 10, XenSource and
others, both in terms of setting up these environments as well as
their ongoing management.
He accepted that virtualisation promises tremendous benefits to
IT, including the ability to consolidate server hardware, provide
business continuity, lower capital costs and increase significantly
the flexibility of the IT infrastructure.
Comparing virtualisation with other hot IT trends that catch fire
with great anticipation and promise, he warned that virtualisation
risks replacing one set of elegantly solved problems with other
issues of equal or greater impact.
Horowitz added that if these issues were not fully anticipated
and dealt with, they can lead to unwieldy complexity, add to IT
labour shortages and have the potential to rapidly spread security
and service delivery problems across a global enterprise.