– Eitan Bremler, Product Manager Virtualization at Radware (www.radware.com), says:

The increase of cloud services adoption has reached the enterprise data center in the form of private clouds. IT managers of private clouds, who wish to dynamically and effectively accommodate the growing number of new hosted applications, should follow the following recommendations:

• Create an elastic data center virtualization infrastructure which can dynamically grow when additional computing resources are needed, or scale down when throughput levels drop and computing resources can be removed.
• Implement an Application Delivery solution which will tightly integrate into an elastic data center, and provide the following capabilities:

o Continuous monitoring of the performance levels of an application as well as network resource availability and other business KPIs (Key Performance Indicators);
o Automatic addition/removal of computing resources within the virtualized infrastructure according to measured KPIs;
o Automatic synchronization of the application delivery’s traffic redirection mechanism, to redirect users and traffic to the newly added computing resources.

Some IT managers would like a more standard approach to the addition or removal of resources, rather than dynamically adding resources based on KPIs. These managers will usually add the new computing resources to the virtual infrastructure manually based on need, then update the application delivery’s configuration.

However, in such an approach, some degree of automation can go a long way to assist IT managers in reducing potential errors and time spent in the virtual infrastructure’s maintenance. These are our recommendations:

• Implement an Application Delivery solution which will tightly integrate into the virtualized infrastructure and provide the following capabilities:

o Continuous monitoring of the virtual infrastructure management center for any additions or removal of virtual resources;
o Automatic synchronization of the application delivery’s traffic redirection mechanism, to redirect users and traffic to the newly added virtual resources.