Virtual Data Centers start to become reality.

With the recent announcement of the CSR 1000v from Cisco, there are now two commercial Virtual Data Center stories (three if we look at the VMWare vCNS products and use one of the other vendors products for a router) Cisco and Vyatta.

What is a Virtual Data Center?  There will be a lot of different answers but in my view it consists of the following:

• A pair of redundant Routers with multiple provider uplinks
• A pair of redundant Firewalls
• A pair of Load Balancers
• Front and Backend Servers

In my previous life designing and building Internet Data Centers we would have build this entire setup out of separate parts taking up an entire rack or two.  Now it could be done in a single blade server with multiple redundant power supplies or a pair of highly spec’d servers.

Now, I want to be clear here: I don’t think that the software based Firewalls are up to the task of the hardware based ones.  I think most security companies/consultants would agree that there is a danger when you host both your servers and your firewall on the same shared hardware.  You could design the setup in a way that the ASA is only hosted on it’s own blade(s) but there is still the inherent risk of a misconfiguration or privilege escalation hack allowing someone to bypass the firewall.

Sadly the way around the security issue is to put a physical firewall in the line.  This can be easily done, so it’s mainly just a CapEx issue.

For routers at this time, we only have Cisco and Vyatta commercially.  They both are offering strong products but Cisco’s CSR 1000v is more feature rich supporting many protocols and features that come from using the previously designed and coded Cisco code base.

In the coming weeks and months I am going to be writing about the products available in the space and what limitations still need to be overcome.  I will be working with Cisco, Vyatta, VMWare and others to try and compile as much information as possible.

Summary: The Virtual Datacenter is here.  It’s not perfect, but all of the parts exist from multiple vendors.  The world of Virtualization just got a lot more interesting.

What are your thoughts?

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