Impact of Virtualization on Management Systems

HP’s Utility Data Center (UDC) [1] is a prominent example of how applications are provided with virtualized storage and network resources. Systems like the UDC are on their way into enterprise IT infrastructures and will have impact on management systems. In this paper we review some of the implications virtualized resource environments have on management systems and what changes are needed in management systems to manage virtualized resources. In virtualized resource environments, applications are not installed on specific hardware instances. Instead, resources are provisioned dynamically to applications as needed. Resource instances may change frequently underneath applications, and vice versa, applications may migrate from one set of resources to another. Management systems must track changes based on information maintained in the virtualization layer. Currently, there is no integration between virtualization layers and systems managing virtualized resources. Furthermore, several assumptions break that are built into management systems today when management systems are applied in virtualized environments. We detail the broken assumptions and show principal solutions.