Virtualisation is part of the future of networks

There is arguably no hotter buzzword in the technology industry right now than virtualisation – and for good reason. Organisations are turning to virtualisation in droves to reduce capacity and energy costs associated with running a traditional hardware network.

Yet, nearly 60 per cent of organisations have seen a slowdown in their virtualisation efforts, according to a report by Nemertes Research. Even though organisations and businesses are reaping some of the benefits of virtualised networks, many of them are probably not making the most of them.

Network engineers know all too well that a virtual topology is fundamentally different from architectures of the past. In a virtual network, traffic never comes into contact with the physical network, where it is easier to capture and analyse. In other words: Network monitoring is a completely different “animal” in a virtual environment, requiring the use of completely different tools and resources.

Good network monitoring for virtual environments must be able to monitor critical applications running in virtual environments and should have the ability to notify IT staff as quickly as possible when problems occur. For example, Liveaction’s OmniEngine works as an application on a virtual network and can analyse the traffic flowing between a physical host and virtual machines. In this way, ‘invisible traffic’ also remains latent.