Lori MacVittie (F5)

Deploying a virtual network appliance is the easy part, it’s the operational management that’s hard.

The buzz and excitement over VMware’s announcement of its new products at VMworld was high and for a brief moment there was a return to  focusing
on the network. You know, the large portion of the data center that
provides connectivity and enables collaboration; the part that delivers
applications to users (which really is the point of all architectures).
Unfortunately the buzz reared up and overtook that focus with yet
another round of double rainbow guy commentary regarding how cool and
great it’s going to be when the network is virtualized and is
“flexible” and “rapidly provisioned” and “cheap.” 

Two of out three ain’t bad, I guess.

As noted by open-source management provider Xenoss in a forthcoming survey
a lot of the folks (more than 70 percent) actually doing the work of
managing a virtualized environment “prefer tools that manage their
entire infrastructure as opposed to a virtualization-specific
solution”. [..]