virtualization job skills eguide

Virtualization trends demand new job skills

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You've helped usher in the age of server virtualization, but it's no time to rest on your laurels. New trends, including hyper-convergence, software-defined networking, identity management, cloud storage and more, are significantly impacting the tasks and responsibilities of todays virtualization admins. For this reason, the SearchServerVirtualization.com editorial team compiled this essential guide to help you stay on top of industry trends and hone your skills for the next generation of virtualization jobs.

Skills for the next generation of virtualization jobs By: Brien Posey

According to many estimates, most organizations have virtualized over half

of their production workloads. Server virtualization has clearly become a

mainstream technology, and there is no shortage of organizations looking to

the future with plans to adopt next-generation virtualization technologies. Of

course, this raises the question of which skills IT professionals should be

focusing on today in order to better prepare themselves for the server

virtualization jobs and technologies of the future.

The first skill that I recommend focusing on to prepare for the next generation

of virtualization jobs might seem a little bit odd, but please hear me out. My

recommendation is to focus on learning (or more likely, relearning) basic

networking. The reason I make this recommendation is that Microsoft and

VMware are both placing a great deal of emphasis on software-defined

networking. SDN allows administrators to gain an unprecedented level of

flexibility over the virtual network architecture. Microsoft's approach, for

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example, allows for the creation of logical networks and VM networks that

overlay the physical network topology. These VM networks can be used to

enable multi-tenancy (among many other things).

Defining logical networks and VM networks on top of the existing physical

network greatly increases the overall network complexity. The level of

complexity is further increased when multi-tenancy (or parallel VM networks)

are brought into the picture. Successfully building and maintaining these

types of networks requires administrators to have a solid understanding of

the way that IP networks work. This includes everything from managing

DHCP scopes to subnetting and packet routing. Taking the time to study up

on IP networking today will likely pay dividends for virtualization admins down

the road.

Another area in which IT professionals must focus their attention in

preparation for next-generation server virtualization is with regard to identity

management. To see why this is the case, consider the idea that many

organizations started out using physical servers and gradually transitioned

some of their workloads into the virtual world. By doing so, the organization

likely created an environment in which it has both physical and virtual servers

that belong to a common Active Directory forest. This approach to server

virtualization is relatively seamless because a user's identity is managed at

the forest level. Hence, the authentication process works in an identical

manner for both physical and virtual machines.

As time goes on, however, resources are likely to become much more widely

scattered than they are today. Organizations may, for example, run some

workloads on local hypervisors, while other workloads run on public clouds.

Even if an organization chooses to keep all production workloads running on-

premises, the organization might choose to configure its virtualization

infrastructure as a private cloud.

The point is that it will eventually become the norm for virtual networks to

extend beyond physical network boundaries. Similarly, it will become much

more common for users to connect to resources that exist in external Active

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Directory forests. As such, IT pros may benefit from studying such concepts

as identity management, Active Directory federation and single sign-on.

Although I believe that networking and identity management will probably be

two of the most important areas of focus going forward, there are plenty of

other technologies worth studying. One such technology is storage.

Anyone who is currently administering a virtual server deployment at an

enterprise scale is no doubt familiar with the various types of storage, as well

as related topics, such as storage connectivity and bandwidth optimization.

While there is no denying the importance of having a solid working

knowledge of enterprise storage, it will conceivably be just as important to

have an understanding of cloud storage.

Many cloud storage providers use object storage as opposed to block

storage, which means that connecting to such a provider will typically involve

the use of a cloud storage gateway. Another trend is that some organizations

have begun striping data across multiple clouds in an effort to prevent a

cloud provider from becoming a single point of failure. This technique is

commonly referred to as BRIC (Bunch of Redundant Independent Clouds).

My point is that cloud storage can be vastly different from enterprise storage.

As time goes on, it will become increasingly common for some VMs to exist

on cloud storage. As such, it may be in virtualization administrators' best

interest to start learning about cloud storage if they have not already.

Although nobody really knows for sure what the future of server virtualization

jobs looks like, it seems like a safe bet that in five years, virtualization

technology will be almost unrecognizable. As such, it is important for

virtualization administrators to begin building skills that will enable them to

cope with next-generation virtualization jobs and technologies.

The hyper-convergence trend will demand new job skills By: Keith Townsend

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Are the days where you could stay in high demand by just being the best

virtualization administrator over?

Hyper-convergence is having an impact on both the infrastructures you

manage and the overall job of the engineer. There's little doubt that service

providers will have a steady demand for engineers focused on the compute

stack of the data center. The scale of these environments dictates that

engineers need to be well versed in the nuances of server virtualization.

On the other hand, hyper-convergence promises reduced operating

expenses. To CIOs, this is code for reducing head count. What should you

do to keep your skills relevant if your company invests in a hyper-converged

infrastructure?

First, it's important to understand the architecture and appeal of a hyper-

converged approach. Vendors have attempted to offer converged products

for years. HP once offered storage arrays built on their server platform. As

x86 hypervisors took hold within the data center, we saw cross-vendor

converged products make headway.

Today's hyper-converged options

One of the most popular hyper-converged products today is VCE. VCE's

vBlock reference architecture combines Cisco network and server hardware,

VMware vSphere and EMC storage. Converged platforms such as vBlock

give companies a solid design foundation and one vendor to go to for

support. One operational disadvantage to the vBlock approach is the reliance

on separate roles or groups needed to managed each sub-component. Most

midsize to large businesses still rely on dedicated storage, server and

network administrators to manage the converged platform.

Hyper-converged products combine all the major subcomponents in a single

appliance or "brick." In most cases, a single 2U server will provide the

virtualization platform, memory, CPU and storage needed to run a simple

virtualized infrastructure. These products incorporate a scale-out architecture

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that allows expansion by just adding another appliance to the infrastructure.

To this point we've mostly described a combination of commodity hardware,

but it's a software layer that makes hyper-converged products truly

appealing. By providing a proprietary interface for management, vendors

offer a single pane of glass administration for the core infrastructure. This

allows a single engineer to manage a large cluster of hyper-converged

nodes, and engineers do not have to worry about the complexity of

configuring a storage area network. On the low end of the market, vendors

such as Scale Computing market their products to organizations without a

virtualization admin.

The aim of any hyper-converged solution is to reduce the administrative

overhead associated with a virtualized infrastructure, but what skill should

you develop to remain a high-demand resource? If you want to continue

adding to your technical skill, you can go the DevOps route, or you could

explore the business side of IT operations.

Better your technical skills

The drive for operational efficiency will not be solved by convergence alone.

Converged platforms don't solve every administrative challenge nor does

every workload lend itself to the architecture. The need to automate

infrastructure tasks provides the ability to automatically provision servers,

VLANs and storage based on a request from the developer or workload

demand and will be a critical value-add for enterprise engineers moving

forward. Automation tools and cloud management solutions are two exciting

technologies that have increasing demands.

To frame the problem, convergence doesn't solve the challenge of

requesting and provisioning the infrastructure. While convergence simplifies

the provisioning of resources, it doesn't address the challenge of creating

VLAN's, making firewall rule changes, creating (or destroying) a virtual

machine and all the other tasks associated with actually bringing up a

workload. Automation tools include products such as Puppet, Chef and

vCloud Automation Center and, generally speaking, take repeatable and

programmable tasks and automate them with scripting.

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Even if organizations don't have a traditional use case for elastic cloud-aware

applications, there's potential value in cloud management products. One of

the best use cases is self-service. The ability of development, test and QA

teams to provision resources from a self-service portal is a tremendous

value. This capability can be found in products such as CloudStack,

OpenStack and VMware vCloud Director.

DevOps is one option, but if you'd like to keep a technology focus as a

secondary skill, then networking is also a solid option.

Better your business skills

Another way to display versatility is by developing some type of business

skill. The two most common skills I see in the field are project management

and business analysis. Both roles require an understanding of both

information technology and the business supported by the technology.

Project management is a fairly common skill to add, as most engineers find

themselves in a position where they are managing the implementation of

technology projects. For IT pros interested in this route, the Project

Management Professional certification allows you to show your knowledge

and boost your resume.

Gaining experience as a business analyst can be more difficult. Engineers

should seek cross-training opportunities that include shadowing or leading

requirements reviews. The ability to translate business requirements into

technical requirements shows that you can fully understand the business

value of technology. Additional topics that can help in this endeavor include

understanding financial terms related to projects and budgets, such as

capital expense vs. operational expenses, total cost of ownership, return on

investment and net present value.

As hyper-converged infrastructure becomes more popular, maintaining your

appeal as a virtualization professional will require adding a skill over and

above understanding virtualization technologies.

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