Cloud-Buddy

As we all know new things are happening in the virtualization world everyday, it doesnt necessarily mean that we should jump on a new technology that got introduced yesterday into our production envirnoment. Every technology has its place and should only be implemneted to benefit the business. Labs are a perfect place to fullfill your apetite for knowing new cool tools not the production world.

In spite of the the advantages a std vSwitch has, a 1000v switch certainly gives you more capabilities. But are the new capabilities really going to be utilized? We have implemented 1000v into the environment and not one person really knows exactly whats going on. It has become more a learn as you go sort of game. Its exciting but only until something really goes wrong. Over time the team has developed a certain level of comfort with the 1000v however we are still not a 100% sure. Besides the idea behind having a distributed switch is also to make changes from a central location. It doesn’t help if you have multiple vCenters when there should have only been multiple clusters in the same vCenter instance. Now you have multiple 1000Vs to manage and more things that could go wrong. But the number of switches would have been far more if these isolated vCenters didnt have distributed switches. Then again, if these were std swicthes, they wouldn’t have had to patched like the VSMs in the 1000v do. And new patches could put a lot at stake. Yeah yeah, you could test it out i labs but we all know its never the same.

My point is, 1000v are great to have, but it goes back to the why do we need it? If you have compelling reasons as to how it could better your environment, one must go ahead with the headache. However, if these reasons don’t hold a lot of weight, the 1000v switch could easily become a hassle. And as always, please do proper testing in labs and don’t simply rely on white papers and he said she said. I have seen these being implemented in environments to give back the switching to the network teams as well. If that is the case, then I am sure your network team will appreciate in being part of the planning. Let’s get one thing straight, just like we don’t want multiple vCenters when multiple clusters within the same vCenter would do the job for obvious reasons, I am sure the networking team would also have issues with multiple vSwithes that they have no control over. Let them take over the switching aspect to better the end result. But lets not introduce this monster until you have a proper understanding of how it actually works. Guessing your way through may help you to set it up, however that may not be an efficient method for troubleshooting when an issues comes up.