HP Virtual Application Networks – drill-down on its inner workings

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By Les Stuart, HP Networking (aka @Netmanles)

Sure there are trends out there that are guiding decisions from vendors and customers. Things like virtualization, the consumerization of IT, mobility and oh yes. . . the cloud.  It all sounds well and good, but people that I talk to worry about complexity, time to service, cost and how to manage this.

Last year I was speaking at an informal event with many potential customers and I heard things like: Make management radically-simpler. Help me take control of virtual sprawl. Help us speed service delivery. Provide me with consistency to help reduce errors. 

OK .. I was listening.  So to our Intelligent Management Center (IMC) portfolio we have just added a Virtual Application Networks manager.  That’s a mouthful. . . rightfully so. The Virtual Application Networks manager provides connectivity-as-a-service.  It enables rapid, error-free service delivery by:

• Using IMC which has deep connection and network knowledge to publish connection information for subscription through a connection designer, with these connection being designed by IT to meet the requirement of new or existing applications (bandwidth, VLANs, ACL, etc.)
• Exposing the published connections through the IMC APIs allowing third-party management systems and other applications (like cloud systems) to leverage the connection management
• Using our own APIs to provide a plug-in to hypervisors to allow system admins to bind dynamic connection information to virtual machines (VMs) with the connection then provisioned automatically by IMC and with the connection binding following the VM through any migration
• Providing a true third-party offering by operating in EVB (802.1Qbg)  and non-EVB environments and working on third-party devices

 

What does it look like behind the pretty user interface?

We call this Virtual Application Network management—and what this means is that you can fully provision and deploy applications and  associated network services in minutes while ensuring the highest possible service levels. This is a huge improvement over “best-effort” networking models based on legacy command line interface and scripts that can take weeks to deploy a new application.  The CLI is dead.

IT managers once again have control and visibility over the impact of virtual machines. System managers no longer have to wait for IT to provision the network in order to deploy a new service or application. It’s the optimal outcome for both.

I’d like to hear your ideas. 

Cheers, @Netmanles

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