Just bump into this article about Cisco Unified Computing while reseraching on virtualization. It seems something is brewing in the backyard. Is there going to be another giant releasing something interesting to the market? Take a look at “Introducing Unified Computing to the Data Center”.  I guess this may be the same thing what Craig is referring to “Consolidate Server, Network Virtualization & Storage”.

Personally I had been urging the storage and network vendor over and over again regarding the 10Ge products. The reason of it is pretty simple that the Fiber Channel is just too expensive to be deployed and managed VS ethernet 10Ge. But the concern is the vendor are very slow responding to the 10Ge release roadmap although customers are demanding on that.

With Intel moving to the market now, I will see that is a big opportunitty to make this 10Ge become inexpensive in the future with the high volume production provide by Intel in the servers’ market NIC. As virtualization become an important piece in the data center, the bandwidth will required to be grow as much as possible at the same time VS CPU Cores and Memory. Intel had proven their right track on the servers NIC as many of us can easily found that the server NICs are produced by Intel. Even in VMware ESX servers, your VM will be provided either AMD or Intel virtual NIC drivers on top of the hypervisor Virtualization.

As a IT Consumers, I am more than happy to see the technology become cheaper and cheaper and of course personally I do believe Intel will able to make the popularization for 10Ge moving forward.

I am strongly disagreed with these comments as most of us know that the reason of consolidate and virtualization, is not for performance reduce, is really to improve efficiency and utilization of the hardware that we purchased. Networking play a big parts in VM infrastructure and most of the time, it did become the performance bottle neck for most users. Let me talk about some example below.

1 of the case i saw here, which the engineer configure it’s ESX in to a server which only have 2 physical NIC connected for VMnetwork interface to allow VM to be connected to the production network. There is more than 10 VMs on the ESX servers which connected to the 2 gigabits NIC and share among each others. In physical environment, for 10 physical servers, they always get 1gb per servers and is not in shared condition. But now, since virtualized, they need to share 2gb with 10 VM. Guess what, the users start complaining slow performance on the network file transfer, the backup through Network is slow as well as any reason that the network slowing down due to the high peak bandwidth utilization from any of the VM which shared on the 2 NICs. Not only the NIC causing the performance issues, and the switches uplink to the DC switches had also another thing you may need to keep an eye on. No matter how many gigabits connection you connected your servers through, it will still depend of the total uplink for your switches to route the traffic to the DC.

In this case, they not really figure out the performance issues as they won’t notice this performance bottleneck in the performance chart from Virtual Center. Most of the time, only the network guys will able to identified these issues. It really hit hard to some of the engineer which push hard on the virtualization, but it did become performance sacrification to the customers at the end. I will not want this to happen for myself, as we had invested SAN storage & High capacity servers which is not cheap solution.

Therefore, I will recommend that to deploy the VM Infrastructure in to enterprise environment in Data Center, we should always plan ahead including the Networking conditions. Again, Virtualization not meant performance sacrification, and virtualization do provide a lot of benefits which physical servers don’t.