Steve Perkins, director of infrastructure at Colorado Housing and Finance Authority, uses Akorri's BalancePoint software to see inside the virtual server and storage resources in his environment. The two go hand in hand, he says, and vendors need to manage at least those two layers to help customers optimize performance across virtual environments.

"We hit a wall on performance last fall. Users were experiencing horrendous performance, our servers were being maxed out; fingers were pointing at everyone," Perkins says.

After hiring a consulting firm that used Akorri software in assessing the environment, Perkins quickly saw that problems in the storage environment were behind the poor server performance. "It showed our [storage-area network] at 100 per cent capacity, and servers with I/O threshold against our SAN were getting hit with the poor performance," he says.

Perkins also is working with Akorri to handle the virtualized storage environment he plans to implement. He wants to see the vendor delve deeper into the layers of virtual storage environments. "Akorri looks at the physical storage, and instead of just seeing those layers, we want to see where the data lies in the virtual space and provide us with the same images as the physical space from the [logical unit number] level," he says.

Automation: the secret sauce

To enable a truly fluid and optimized virtual environment, management-software makers not only have to expand their reach into multiple virtual domains but also integrate extensive automation technologies.

Ed Traylor, senior director of IT and technical operations at US-based Care2, an online community for green living and social change, would like to share storage resources across virtual instances. In essence, he wants to create a virtual SAN by orchestrating the connection between virtual machines and local disks. The ability to provision virtual machines intelligently across multiple physical hosts would require a heterogeneous virtual-management system, he adds.

Traylor has a NetApp file-attached storage system and employs iSCSI to port Web-server virtual machines to the physical hosts. Should a physical host fail, his team can quickly resurrect a virtual machine on any given blade server. Care2 runs Fibre Channel via a redundant mesh to IBM BladeCenter servers that host the virtual database servers. Traylor uses IBM's Director systems-management software to provide predictive failure analysis, data collection and automated deployment updates. Work still needs to be done to fully manage and ultimately optimize such environments, he says.

"If we're being hypothetical, then a fair assessment would be that [virtual machines] would operate in scalable, self-aware clusters that provision themselves for specific applications based on demand - and all of this would happen completely without human interaction," Traylor says. "Tasks such as provisioning, load balancing and fault tolerance would be handled by the virtual machines' artificial intelligence. From an operational or engineering perspective, all you provide is bandwidth, content and electricity."