VMware has recommended organisations follow up server virtualisation and virtualise the rest of the data centre, including the network.
As expected, SDN and virtualised networks have been hot topics at this year’s Interop show, along with cloud computing and network optimisation. And VMware wants to play a role in each of those conversations.
The company is already a market-leading provider of the virtualisation technology that is widely used among enterprises to slice servers into multiple parts. About 60% of the world’s workloads now are virtualised, says Allwyn Sequeira, CTO and vice president of cloud networking and security for VMware.
Despite all the virtualisation though, enterprises are not leveraging the full benefits of the technology, he says. The rest of the data centre, from security to firewalls and load balancers all the way through to the network can all be virtualised, he says. Doing so could lead to advancements in those systems similar to what server virtualisation has done, he says.
This software-defined data centre, as VMware CTO Steve Herrod described it in an Interop keynote speech, encompasses all the various parts of the data centre to all be virtualised. VMware’s products in this field include the vSwitch and the Virtual Distributed Switch, which virtualise switches, VXLAN, which allows portability of virtual workloads within the data centre and beyond, and vShield, which enables virtualised security resources that the company worked with other companies, such as Cisco Juniper Networks and Symantec, to create.
Sequeira says it’s an evolution that companies will make at their own pace.
"I think people are beginning to wake up to the fact that network virtualisation is important," he says. "We’ve been doing it, but with the advancements in cloud, there’s an increasing need to virtualise everything else. We believe that will be the evolution for many enterprises."
VMware is certainly not alone in this thinking. John Engates, CTO of Rackspace, a major public cloud and managed hosting vendor, as well as one of the backers of the OpenStack open source cloud project, says VMware’s notion that virtualising the network is a key to realising the full effect of server virtualisation is about right. He just believes there’s a different way to go about doing it.
The OpenStack project has embraced SDN with its Quantum project, which aims to create an open source virtualised network offering. Nicira is one of the leading companies advancing the Quantum project. Engates says while virtualising the rest of the data centre, including the network, needs to happen, it should be done in an open source way. "If we’re reinventing IT right now, should we reinvent it on one vendor’s vision, or should we reinvent it with all of our visions in the mix?" Engates asks.
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