Microsoft Virtualization Secrets

Managing the Fabric

Now that you understand the ways to interact with SCVMM, this section dives into what you can actually do; managing the fabric is really where you will spend a lot of time. When you think of fabric, images of material used to make your clothing and linens likely spring to mind, and this is exactly what it means in terms of your virtual environment—the underlying source material that enables you to virtualize your environment. In terms of virtualization, three types of fabric are most important for visibility and management:

• Compute: The virtualization hosts and clusters of hosts
• Network: The underlying network and network devices such as load balancers
• Storage: External storage arrays, such as SANs, that are used to store the virtual machines and other assets

IOPS provides a measurement of the transfer speed of a disk or set of disks. The higher the number, the faster the storage. The highest performing workloads need storage with very high IOPS.

Although previous versions of SCVMM did a good job of exposing the compute fabric and enabling management, they really didn’t provide much information about the network and storage fabrics. Network and storage fabric intelligence and management are necessary when environments are housed in many different locations, and each location may have different types of storage, different IP subnets, and different load-balancing equipment. Administrators need to be able to deploy a virtual machine or multi-tiered service ...