Virtualization Management

To maintain the resiliency and availability of the Dynamic Datacenter, infrastructure and management software will be required for conducting the following activities:

• Directory and authentication services
• Virtual machine management 
• Configuration management
• Software distribution, inventory, and patch management
• Operating system deployment
• Event monitoring and collection
• Remote desktop services
• Hardware management

Unless the organization is beginning from a completely new infrastructure, it will likely already have some, if not all, of this infrastructure and management software in place.

The infrastructure and management servers should adhere to the same service level expectations as the workloads that are hosted in the Dynamic Datacenter; thus these servers should be monitored and managed with the same rigor used for the other components. Many of the management solutions can run in a virtual environment; but whether physical or virtual servers are used, an independent set of servers should be set up so that the management and monitoring systems are separated from the systems being monitored.