Virtual Machine Mobility - the key facts to know

Data centers need to be designed to support frequent change. Virtual machines can be migrated manually or dynamically from one server to another to improve load balancing or resource utilization, allow maintenance, or address specific geographic needs. Cisco Unified Fabric is designed with highly-scalable, high-performance Layer 2 networks that can span a single data center or multiple data centers, facilitating your evolution to cloud computing.

General network administrators can build extreme flexibility into their designs to shift large workloads between servers and facilities, potentially opening new frontiers in disaster recovery, data center consolidation, and energy management. And, the Cisco Unified Fabric allows you to build this capability at the pace your business needs, extending investment protection for existing Layer 3 architectures or mixed environments.

To maintain security and compliance as you virtualize your data centers and evolve to private cloud architecture, you will need to ensure that the right policies follow a virtual machine wherever it moves. This comprehensive view of virtual machine and security policies meets the requirements of both network and security administrators, and because the switching, security, intrusion-detection, and policy capabilities are all virtualized, they also lay the foundation for hybrid cloud architectures in the future. 

IT standardization is a strategy that requires establishing uniform specifications for IT infrastructure and processes and minimizing the number of similar technologies used to address the same basic need. Once in place, standardization can streamline procurement, simplify management, reduce maintenance effort, and speed deployments. The goal of standardization is to deliver consistently high-quality services at less cost.

Another aspect of standardization is the use of standards-based products with open APIs. Industry-standards-based solutions promote common architectures and make it easier to integrate new technologies and functionality into core business processes. It is rare to find an off-the-shelf product that precisely matches business needs, making it necessary to combine products from different vendors—a process made easier by standard interfaces and protocols.