What are the Five Most Pressing Issues for Admins?
In order to better serve the many down-in-the-trenches, admin readers of Virtualization Review, I reached out to our two blogger/columnists, Rick Vanover and David Davis, with a question: What are the five most important issues to admins?
First, Rick's responses:
- How to troubleshoot--It is easy to implement a virtual (or cloud) infrastructure, but when things go awry, what do you do?
- Revisit the workloads and applications--Too many times we have the "rocks" in the datacenter that cannot become virtual or cloud workloads. What do we need to do to get rid of them?
- Existing product lifecycles--Too many pieces are in place (primarily storage and networking) to rip it all out and go with a new infrastructure, as lifecycles may not be in sync.
- How to get to 10GB Ethernet--This will make the experience better as well as enable higher-performing iSCSI networks to help me migrate away from Fibre Channel.
- How to dump Fibre Channel--I want 10 Gig E to go down in price, and for the love of silicon, give me a reasonably priced 8-12-port 10 Gig E Switch.
Next, David's responses:
- Keeping tech hardware and software up to date--new security patches, virtualization software updates, new hardware announcements, etc.
- Keeping pace with education and certification.
- Balancing the virtual load--Use DRS to make sure that one VM doesn't over-utilize one server and slow down other VMs/resource management.
- Disaster recovery--Virtualization simplifies the planning and containerizes servers but also puts more eggs in one basket.
- "The Cloud"--Does this thing really apply to my company? Is this hype really valid?
Questions: Do you share any or all of these 10 concerns? If not, what are your most pressing issues? Comment here.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 07/06/2010 at 12:48 PM