Virtualization vs. Transparent Datacenter

Virtualization is great for "hiding the plumbing" -- if you don't want to see the underlying infrastructure, the abstraction layer provided by VMware or other virtualization software does a good job of masking it. But when you do want to see what is happening underneath, the same old tools won't do the trick.

"Monitoring is the key to knowing what is going on," says Jeff Rountree, Global Network Manager for Pump Solutions Group (PSG) in Redlands, California. "It is a lot easier to figure out before the fact what is happening, rather than trying to look for something after the fact."

PSG is a multi-billion dollar unit of Dover Corporation comprised of seven pump companies in the U.S., Germany, China, India and France. As part of its actions to consolidate the IT infrastructure among its companies, including bringing all the companies into a common Exchange forest and replicating between VMware farms in different data centers, PSG started using Solar Winds' Orion network management software to gain visibility.

"Previously we only had voice going over the WAN, no real file or data sharing," says Rountree. "Once we started consolidating networks and sharing more resources between sites, we wanted to know what was going over the WAN."

Read the rest at Enterprise Networking Planet.