Page 160 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

MANA GEMENT STRATEGIES F O R THE CL OUD R EV OL UTION

One key to making self-provisioning work will be coming
up with the right set of options for end users without allowing
a proliferation of designs that require frequent maintenance.
Designing acceptable virtual machine servers will no longer
remain the private preserve of the server’s system administra-
tor. It will take a collaboration among the system administrator,

the network manager, and the security officer to produce the
most viable models or templates.
In the past, each skilled staff member applied her knowl-
edge to the task in isolation, keeping a narrow focus on one
domain to preserve her depth of knowledge. Frequently, the
chief security officer was the last reviewer, coming in at the last
minute to insist on changes that would make a server config-

uration conform to security policies. A virtual machine golden
image will need to get all its elements aligned right when the
model is created, not in review afterward. If the number of
server ports allowed is going to restrict what the server can
accomplish, the network manager and the security officer are
going to have to resolve what the top priority is for a particular
model up front. The resulting template may serve as the basis
for thousands of successive virtual machines, and any error in-
corporated into its final design will be replicated thousands of

times.
In the view of some observers, the role of server adminis-
tration will be displaced by the new importance of application
administration. Server administration will move up into the
layer of virtual machine monitoring and management soft-
ware. Application administration will become the new focus.
As noted in Chapter 3, virtualization breaks the link between

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