Virtualization trends demand new job skills

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2 You've helped usher in the age of server virtualization, but it's no time to rest on your laurels. New trends, including hyper-convergence, softwaredefined networking, identity management, cloud storage and more, are significantly impacting the tasks and responsibilities of today s virtualization admins. For this reason, the SearchServerVirtualization.com editorial team compiled this essential guide to help you stay on top of industry trends and hone your skills for the next generation of virtualization jobs. Skills for the next generation of virtualization jobs By: Brien Posey According to many estimates, most organizations have virtualized over half of their production workloads. Server virtualization has clearly become a mainstream technology, and there is no shortage of organizations looking to the future with plans to adopt next-generation virtualization technologies. Of course, this raises the question of which skills IT professionals should be focusing on today in order to better prepare themselves for the server virtualization jobs and technologies of the future. The first skill that I recommend focusing on to prepare for the next generation of virtualization jobs might seem a little bit odd, but please hear me out. My recommendation is to focus on learning (or more likely, relearning) basic networking. The reason I make this recommendation is that Microsoft and VMware are both placing a great deal of emphasis on software-defined networking. SDN allows administrators to gain an unprecedented level of flexibility over the virtual network architecture. Microsoft's approach, for Page 1 of 7

3 example, allows for the creation of logical networks and VM networks that overlay the physical network topology. These VM networks can be used to enable multi-tenancy (among many other things). Defining logical networks and VM networks on top of the existing physical network greatly increases the overall network complexity. The level of complexity is further increased when multi-tenancy (or parallel VM networks) are brought into the picture. Successfully building and maintaining these types of networks requires administrators to have a solid understanding of the way that IP networks work. This includes everything from managing DHCP scopes to subnetting and packet routing. Taking the time to study up on IP networking today will likely pay dividends for virtualization admins down the road. Another area in which IT professionals must focus their attention in preparation for next-generation server virtualization is with regard to identity management. To see why this is the case, consider the idea that many organizations started out using physical servers and gradually transitioned some of their workloads into the virtual world. By doing so, the organization likely created an environment in which it has both physical and virtual servers that belong to a common Active Directory forest. This approach to server virtualization is relatively seamless because a user's identity is managed at the forest level. Hence, the authentication process works in an identical manner for both physical and virtual machines. As time goes on, however, resources are likely to become much more widely scattered than they are today. Organizations may, for example, run some workloads on local hypervisors, while other workloads run on public clouds. Even if an organization chooses to keep all production workloads running onpremises, the organization might choose to configure its virtualization infrastructure as a private cloud. The point is that it will eventually become the norm for virtual networks to extend beyond physical network boundaries. Similarly, it will become much more common for users to connect to resources that exist in external Active Page 2 of 7

4 Directory forests. As such, IT pros may benefit from studying such concepts as identity management, Active Directory federation and single sign-on. Although I believe that networking and identity management will probably be two of the most important areas of focus going forward, there are plenty of other technologies worth studying. One such technology is storage. Anyone who is currently administering a virtual server deployment at an enterprise scale is no doubt familiar with the various types of storage, as well as related topics, such as storage connectivity and bandwidth optimization. While there is no denying the importance of having a solid working knowledge of enterprise storage, it will conceivably be just as important to have an understanding of cloud storage. Many cloud storage providers use object storage as opposed to block storage, which means that connecting to such a provider will typically involve the use of a cloud storage gateway. Another trend is that some organizations have begun striping data across multiple clouds in an effort to prevent a cloud provider from becoming a single point of failure. This technique is commonly referred to as BRIC (Bunch of Redundant Independent Clouds). My point is that cloud storage can be vastly different from enterprise storage. As time goes on, it will become increasingly common for some VMs to exist on cloud storage. As such, it may be in virtualization administrators' best interest to start learning about cloud storage if they have not already. Although nobody really knows for sure what the future of server virtualization jobs looks like, it seems like a safe bet that in five years, virtualization technology will be almost unrecognizable. As such, it is important for virtualization administrators to begin building skills that will enable them to cope with next-generation virtualization jobs and technologies. The hyper-convergence trend will By: Keith Townsend Page 3 of 7

5 Are the days where you could stay in high demand by just being the best virtualization administrator over? Hyper-convergence is having an impact on both the infrastructures you manage and the overall job of the engineer. There's little doubt that service providers will have a steady demand for engineers focused on the compute stack of the data center. The scale of these environments dictates that engineers need to be well versed in the nuances of server virtualization. On the other hand, hyper-convergence promises reduced operating expenses. To CIOs, this is code for reducing head count. What should you do to keep your skills relevant if your company invests in a hyper-converged infrastructure? First, it's important to understand the architecture and appeal of a hyperconverged approach. Vendors have attempted to offer converged products for years. HP once offered storage arrays built on their server platform. As x86 hypervisors took hold within the data center, we saw cross-vendor converged products make headway. Today's hyper-converged options One of the most popular hyper-converged products today is VCE. VCE's vblock reference architecture combines Cisco network and server hardware, VMware vsphere and EMC storage. Converged platforms such as vblock give companies a solid design foundation and one vendor to go to for support. One operational disadvantage to the vblock approach is the reliance on separate roles or groups needed to managed each sub-component. Most midsize to large businesses still rely on dedicated storage, server and network administrators to manage the converged platform. Hyper-converged products combine all the major subcomponents in a single appliance or "brick." In most cases, a single 2U server will provide the virtualization platform, memory, CPU and storage needed to run a simple virtualized infrastructure. These products incorporate a scale-out architecture Page 4 of 7

6 that allows expansion by just adding another appliance to the infrastructure. To this point we've mostly described a combination of commodity hardware, but it's a software layer that makes hyper-converged products truly appealing. By providing a proprietary interface for management, vendors offer a single pane of glass administration for the core infrastructure. This allows a single engineer to manage a large cluster of hyper-converged nodes, and engineers do not have to worry about the complexity of configuring a storage area network. On the low end of the market, vendors such as Scale Computing market their products to organizations without a virtualization admin. The aim of any hyper-converged solution is to reduce the administrative overhead associated with a virtualized infrastructure, but what skill should you develop to remain a high-demand resource? If you want to continue adding to your technical skill, you can go the DevOps route, or you could explore the business side of IT operations. Better your technical skills The drive for operational efficiency will not be solved by convergence alone. Converged platforms don't solve every administrative challenge nor does every workload lend itself to the architecture. The need to automate infrastructure tasks provides the ability to automatically provision servers, VLANs and storage based on a request from the developer or workload demand and will be a critical value-add for enterprise engineers moving forward. Automation tools and cloud management solutions are two exciting technologies that have increasing demands. To frame the problem, convergence doesn't solve the challenge of requesting and provisioning the infrastructure. While convergence simplifies the provisioning of resources, it doesn't address the challenge of creating VLAN's, making firewall rule changes, creating (or destroying) a virtual machine and all the other tasks associated with actually bringing up a workload. Automation tools include products such as Puppet, Chef and vcloud Automation Center and, generally speaking, take repeatable and programmable tasks and automate them with scripting. Page 5 of 7

7 Even if organizations don't have a traditional use case for elastic cloud-aware applications, there's potential value in cloud management products. One of the best use cases is self-service. The ability of development, test and QA teams to provision resources from a self-service portal is a tremendous value. This capability can be found in products such as CloudStack, OpenStack and VMware vcloud Director. DevOps is one option, but if you'd like to keep a technology focus as a secondary skill, then networking is also a solid option. Better your business skills Another way to display versatility is by developing some type of business skill. The two most common skills I see in the field are project management and business analysis. Both roles require an understanding of both information technology and the business supported by the technology. Project management is a fairly common skill to add, as most engineers find themselves in a position where they are managing the implementation of technology projects. For IT pros interested in this route, the Project Management Professional certification allows you to show your knowledge and boost your resume. Gaining experience as a business analyst can be more difficult. Engineers should seek cross-training opportunities that include shadowing or leading requirements reviews. The ability to translate business requirements into technical requirements shows that you can fully understand the business value of technology. Additional topics that can help in this endeavor include understanding financial terms related to projects and budgets, such as capital expense vs. operational expenses, total cost of ownership, return on investment and net present value. As hyper-converged infrastructure becomes more popular, maintaining your appeal as a virtualization professional will require adding a skill over and above understanding virtualization technologies. Page 6 of 7

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