Automating virtualization

Hi! My name is Richard Whitehead, I am the Director of Product Marketing at Novell.

Today, we are going to be talking about automating virtualization. Today's data centers are experiencing increased pressure we call it the data center squeeze. They are seeing increase in user demands; they are seeing an increase in cooling costs; increase in power costs; and change of technology is happening every single day.

These data centers typically see two different types of environments. In the traditional data center, we see a physical environment one, where the application is associated directly with the server.

With this environment, however, you see an increase of complexity; an increase in costs. So, organizations are turning to new technologies to help solve these physical environments.

One of those new technologies is, what we call, virtual or virtual machines. With virtual machines, organizations can consolidate multiple physical servers into a single virtual machine. This, of course, helps with the lowering of costs and lowering of complexity, but it creates additional problems.

Some of those problems include, what we call, virtual machine sprawl. Machines can be created very easily, and therefore they can be created all over the place.

Are they properly patched? Are they updated properly? Are they running throughout the environment? And finally: do I have enough storage to ensure that all the virtual machines are stored in a central location?

Managing the entire life cycle of virtual environment can be very complex. Organizations, then, need a bridge between both the physical and the virtual environment, so that they can manage both. That bridge, we call management.

So the equation to get to an optimized data center is quite simple: virtualization (or the virtual machines that you have), plus automation (or the management that you have in place for managing both physical and virtual environments), plus the performance (or the hardware and operating system that you run), equal an optimized data center.

To have an optimized data center means several benefits. Those benefits include: lower cost for cooling, power consumption and managing your environment; lower complexity so that you can know what you have and where they are at all times; and finally, lowering the chaos or the change that occurs throughout your environment.

The key to having an optimized data center is being able to bridge the gap between the physical and the virtual world through automation.

Thank you very much.