Virtualization technology is gaining momentum in enterprise data centers; Enterprises are adopting this technology to increase compute resource utilization and obtain cost savings and operational benefits. In virtualized environments, virtual machines can move anywhere in geographically distributed data centers to provide added application resiliency and flexible workload mobility.
Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE), integrated with Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches and VMware vCenter, delivers dynamic workload scaling to enable faster and more efficient deployment of distributed data centers. This integration is an integral component of the Cisco ACE the Virtual Data Center (AVDC) solution that enables the latest innovations in virtualized and cloud computing technologies. The Cisco ACE product family addresses many of the core challenges facing the virtual data center. These products provide an application delivery solution that improves application scale and availability while enabling better utilization of infrastructure resources through offloading and compression technologies.
Cisco ACE integrates with Cisco Nexus 7000 and VMware vCenter to deliver intelligent load-balancing in distributed data centers. Cisco ACE queries Cisco Nexus 7000 to obtain the virtual machine locality information and actively monitors the CPU and memory utilization of the local virtual machines to determine when local resources are scarce. With virtual machine locality and resource utilization information, Cisco ACE is now able to make dynamic load-balancing decisions based on user configurations. During normal operations when local resources are sufficient, ACE load-balances the incoming traffic to only the local virtual machines. When local resources become scarce due to increased workload, ACE dynamically adds more compute resources to service the increased load by leveraging OTV to direct traffic to additional servers in a remote data center.
Now Lets try to simplify it. Cisco ACE can be directly integrated with VMWare VCenter to monitor the availablity and utilization of the virtual machines and based on the utilization of the VMs, It can take dynamic decisions to load balance the traffic across geographies. When a local VM reaches the threshhold limits, ACE can forward the traffic to another location using the Layer 2 traffic forwarding feature of OTV built into Nexus switches. So, Now instead of adding more and more compute resources to the primary site, you would be able to use the resources at the DR site and that too without any human intervention and as far as business benefits of same are concerned -
- Increased application resiliency: DWS enables effective disaster-recovery mechanisms that increase availability of the applications through flexible workload mobility.
- Flexibility: DWS extends ACE intelligence to achievegreater virtual data center resilience, performance, and flexibility.
- Greater scalability: As data centers evolve from a hierarchical architectural model to a flatter Layer 2–based distributed model, DWS enables businesses to scale applications and the infrastructure without increasing the costs and resources needed foradministration and management.
- Optimal hardware resource utilization: By distributing workload to a remote data center only when local compute resources have been fully utilized, CiscoACE offers significant cost saving benefits and operational benefits.
For More Information on Cisco Virtual Datacenters - Please visit http://www.cisco.com/go/ace