Dell Dives Deeper into Network Virtualization

Network Visibility Can Help Avoid the IT Blame Game

IT organizations generally have a lot of visibility into virtual machines these days. But when it comes to the virtual switches that those machines rely on to communicate with each other, most IT organizations are flying blind.

To address that specific issue, Dell today unveiled version 8.0 of the enterprise edition of the Foglight for Virtualization management framework, which adds support for virtual Ethernet networking.

John Maxwell, vice president of virtualization monitoring for Dell Software, says that providing visibility at the packet level into virtual network, such as vSwitch from VMware, has become a critical element of maintaining application performance.

With more virtual machines running in the enterprise than ever, each of those virtual machines is accessing a virtual network that is one of hundreds of connections running on a physical network. Unless IT organizations have visibility into how the packets on those virtual networks move, Maxwell says they can’t readily identify the primary source of application performance issues.

Other new features added to Foglight in this release include a change analyzer component that provides cross-hypervisor change tracking capabilities, the ability to retain a history of what changes have been made to the environment, new capacity management tools and a new dashboard, which makes it easier to identify the relationships among multiple virtual objects.

Ever since virtualization became popular, IT organizations have lamented some of the visibility they used to have when dealing with physical infrastructure. As IT management tools continue to improve, however, a lot of that lost visibility is finally starting to return—at a time when the IT environment has never been more complex to manage.