Interop: Weaving New Fabrics: Page 2 of 2

Brocade is another vendor whose announcement on their Application Resource Broker raises the stakes for automating virtual machine environments. Application Resource Broker is a VMware vCenter plug-in that automates, in concert with Brocades ADX application delivery devices, the provisioning and de-provisioning of virtual machines in a VMware environment.

The idea is simple. When you deploy an application in vCenter, you create the base images of the application and create a number of clones that essentially do nothing until needed. These are put into a resource pool. As demand increases, the ADX signals the broker to add new VM and the required dependencies to meet the new load. Once the new capacity is added, it gets added to the ADX pool and starts to handle requests. As demand drops, virtual servers can be spun down. The decision to spin up and down as adjustable thresholds so that servers don't get spun and down rapidly based on momentary spikes.

Last year Citrix announced similar integration with XEN, their Netscalar ADC and Workflow Studio. Brocade broker or Citrix's studio can be used in a very targeted fashion so you can start small and keep a person in the loop and grow and automate if and when the technology and processes prove themselves reliable.

This is what you'll be dealing with in the future. The network will run itself and rather than provisioning ports and adding servers, you will be developing port profiles and applying them to VMs, which in turn get applied and removed from physical and virtual ports as needed. An agile data center can't be managed manually. It is hard giving up that control? You bet it is, and no one is suggesting that you flip the switch data center-wide today. But you can start piloting these types of technologies if they are available from your preferred vendor and start planning on putting them into production. You will be glad you started early.