You (or the guy/gal a few cubes over responsible for a VMware deployment) are packing your business cards and socks for Las Vegas this weekend. Your goal for next week? Minimize gambling losses and learn how to advance your VMware deployment.
Las Vegas hotel check-in lines remind me of the security, manageability, and performance issues in a datacenter. Sometimes, everything works fine. However, we can be blindsided to issues that didn’t exist at the beginning of the journey, such as the 3 families and a guy in a superman suit ahead of you in line all needing to fix an incorrect reservations with not enough poor souls assigned to the front desk.
In the Juniper booth (1207) next week, we want to talk to you about making sure you don’t gamble with your virtualized applications and avoiding the uncertainty of your next virtualization project. We want to make sure your virtualization deployment evolves steadily to critical applications without getting blindsided by security or network constraints that appear in highly virtualized and dynamic environments. What should you (or your Vegas bound colleague) look for when planning the next phases of your datacenter virtualization? In the Juniper booth, we’ll be talking about the following issues:
- Less risk, more visibility: As you add mission critical applications, can you apply the same granular security controls in a virtualized environment that you can in a physical environment? How do you enforce and track the lifecycle of a virtual machine? Do you have a virtual security strategy? How does your compliance officer feel about that? Can a simplified infrastructure improve service delivery? Do you need to segregate multiple tenants inside your datacenter or cloud?
- Less complexity, more stability: Many leading adopters of server virtualization and cloud services have succeeded by simplifying the number of server configurations they support and other efforts to standardize and simplify physical and virtual servers. But what about the rest of the infrastructure? Are there ways to simplify the security and network infrastructure in order to make it easier to secure and more stable? Can you scale a virtual environment without running into network constraints?
- Fewer compromises, more secure: Lots of people want to talk about virtualized security, but well how do virtual firewalls perform? Do they integrate with policies and zones for physical traffic flows across the datacenter enforced by a physical firewall or are they limited to traffic inside a virtualized server? How do provide consistent service to multiple tenants in a datacenter across a mix of physical and virtual machines?
- Fewer application detours, more direct flights: Application performance can’t suffer at the expense of savings generated by server virtualization. In a world where all of your applications are made up of multiple components, is the communication between those components fast and predictable or not? In a virtualized datacenter, it should not matter where you put something. Does location matter in your datacenter? How can you build a datacenter where applications perform great without regard to the network distance between any component?
- Better mobility: Virtual clients hold lots of promise, how do you securely deploy a mix of virtual clients and web applications to an entire enterprise across many different device types?
- Free beer: Tuesday from 4 to 6
Outside of the booth:
Andy Ingram, Juniper’s SVP WW Datacenters, is speaking at session SPO3993 Evolving the Cloud Foundation: What’s the Right Network & Security Architecture for Your Cloud? (Twitter hashtag: #SPO3993) – Wednesday, 8/31/11 at 8am - type Juniper into the keyword filter of the VMworld content catalog.
Chris Hoff, Juniper’s Chief Enterprise Security Architect will be talking about virtualized datacenters and the evolution of security in a virtualized datacenter to cloud services. Wednesday, 8/31/11 at 3:10pm at the Solutions Theater (show floor)
What’s my goal for next week? I’m going to try not to get “beaned in the head” playing vOdgeball. The second annual vOdgeball tournament is raising money for the Wounded Warrior project, so please join me in donating generously.
A 2010 vOdgeball player getting "beaned in the head" which is also a phrase I have not used since 3rd grade..
Note - if anyone has a good way of linking to individual VMworld sessions I'm all ears.
Juniper VMworld Booth: 1207
Rami Rahim (RamiRahim)
on:
The Next Chapter in the Converged Supercore
