Virtual Steve : Weblog

Wednesday Jun 06, 2007

Tracking Virtualized Environments

Asking the question "what stuff do I have?" gets exponentially harder in an environment with virtualized assets. When operating systems and hardware are not bound to a specific piece of hardware it can be very tricky. With technologies like Xen, Solaris Containers are VMware it can be hard to know what's running at any given time, even in your own data center. This is a key reason that network-based discovery technology is going to be so important in the modern data center. Typical, old-school, asset tracking systems that depend on clipboards or barcodes can't keep up with constantly moving workloads. How do you even have a discussion with your software vendors about which instances of your software are supported?

These are things the new Sun Connection inventory channel can help with. Go check it out.

Posted at 05:00AM Jun 06, 2007 by Stephen Wilson in Virtualization | Comments[1]

Comments:

Come on ... The discovery channel is relying on an agent running within the OS. In the case of virtualization, in the guest OS, since, usually, you do not have agents in the host (for VMware ESX at least), and in the case of Solaris, it was not able to discover my zones ..., while running in the global zone. Discovery channel is NOT network based. It's an old school agent based discovery. It's light years behind in term of capabilities compared to "real" topology, relationship discovery. What Sun has built is an asset discovery tool that is used to collect statistics on what customers are using. It seems to have been designed with that in mind. Otherwise, why is SUNWstosreg any part of that ?

Posted by 198.175.229.3 on June 06, 2007 at 10:35 AM PDT #