So you're right, a lot of companies are just starting to come to it. We just finished a survey, it's not published yet, asking people about optimization and management. I was really surprised that moving a VM and all the supporting infrastructure was not regarded as being very difficult by very many of the people. I mean, I'm not surprised, given our conversation. They haven't gotten to the point of trying it and seeing what the challenges are.
NWC: So given that, what absolutely has to change to make the networks able to support the vision of mobile, agile infrastructure?
Metzler: That's the hundred-dollar question. When I start that session at Interop, it's my goal to be clear that I am not going to have people walking out with a blueprint, you know, here are the five things you have to do, etc. It's more about looking for some "aha" moments or having people think, "I have to get my mind around this." I was talking one of the networking sponsors, HP, and he was like, "Well, Jim, we're working with industry forums to get some of this standardized, but there's not always agreement between the players." Cisco has an approach that ties a VM to a port on a switch, and that makes some things easier, but maybe it doesn't scale as well.
So what I want people getting out of this is an understanding that among the major vendors here, there are the areas where they agree, and the areas where they don't. Some of that, in time, will be driven by standards, but you and I can agree that standards are very slow moving and tend to be a least-common denominator. Some will be driven by market dominance, I mean, Cisco is a dominant player and they tend to be followed by a lot of people. Some may be driven by consortia, or what vendors agree on amongst themselves. So we've got to clear this up, we've got this Layer 2 domain, extending VLANs -- what? three VLANs for every VM, the management, control, and the actual data -- and extend them over a WAN? That's probably okay for getting started, but I'm not sure I can see that as the long-term vision.
But I don't know what the long term vision is. In this session, I'm trying to begin the conversation with multiple vendors in the room, and people getting a few "aha" moments. Then again, if you are a SMB, and you have a little bit of VMotion over the WAN, you can probably get away, for a while, with extending your VLANs across the WAN, but I don't think that's the solution for the enterprise. For the first time in a decade, we're going to be having some serious conversations about LAN architecture.
NWC: So in the LAN architecture, one of the themes that I keep hearing from multiple vendors is "the flattening of the network."
Metzler: Yeah, right now we have a nice flat Layer 2 Network.
