When you consider just how underutilized today’s traditional servers are in a typical network, it’s clear how beneficial virtualization technology is to the future of the computer industry. Unfortunately, many organizations fail to properly evaluate how to monitor virtualized networks. Some preplanning ahead can save lots of time and headaches later on.
In the past, a network professional might use security devices or monitoring servers to keep an eye on network activity. This is acceptable, but things are changing so quickly in the technology world that it is best to consider other alternatives now that virtualized environments are coming to the forefront.
Traditional networks communicate from device to device so monitoring is relatively straight forward. In contrast, virtual environments communicate from one virtual machine to another across one or several devices. Therefore, to get an accurate picture of your entire network you must investigate solutions that monitor your physical and virtual networks.
When looking at the devices that run your virtual environments, you also must try to be aware that with many different virtual machines running on one device, vulnerabilities that could possibly exist in the software abstraction layer between the hardware and software. You need to be able to make sure that not only are VMs secure, but you also have to stay aware of the machines that are running what could be tens or possibly hundreds of separate environments.
So it goes both ways, and in order to properly manage all this you need to have a sophisticated solution that allows you to monitor network performance holistically. Network management in this new era is both exciting and challenging at the same time. Of course, that’s why technology is such an interesting field, right?