Challenges In Virtualized Datacenter Management

Jennifer Anderson and Ravi Soundararajan, VMware, Palo Alto, CA

Stevenson Hall 1300
12:00 PM - 12:50 PM

Virtualization has become the de facto policy for server deployment in modern Fortune-500 companies. When an end-user requests a new server, the first question that is asked is no longer "why virtualize" but "why NOT virtualize." In reducing server sprawl, virtualization has also become part of the IT revolution toward Green Computing. In this talk, we will give a brief retrospective on x86-based virtualization, describe its evolution as a dominant datacenter and cloud technology, and also describe some of the challenges we face in virtualized datacenter management. We will describe how virtualization creates new management workflows that ease large-scale administration, but require re-thinking the design of datacenters for best performance.