5. The challenge of seamless management of physical and logical servers

What are the challenges from now onwards?

SekiguchiIn an environment in which logical and physical server both exist, where business applications are sometimes running on physical server and sometimes running on virtual servers, it is thought that management of a system might become a bit more difficult. Given that, it is also necessary to make management as transparent as possible. In this case, transparent means "seamless"; that is to say, management is possible without awareness of whether the physical server or logical server is the object. It is important that management operations can follow exactly the same procedures.
As for operating a mission-critical system in a mixed environment composed of physical servers and logical servers, what kind of operation management system will become necessary is the theme of our future research. Ultimately, we think that we should pursue "usability" as a system and take the lead in server virtualization technology from now into the future.

Figure 4: Seamless management of physical and logical servers

(Publication: Jun. 19, 2008)