Two good, full years into the virtualization revolution in the data center and things are going swimmingly. You can’t walk into a data center today without seeing physical servers running Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere 4, or another virtual server platform, and IT departments are already moving past basic deployment of those platforms into other areas where they can become more mobile and agile such as cloud computing and data center to data center virtualization.

And yet despite this overwhelming acceptance and adoption of virtualization, management of virtual assets – both discretely as well as part of a larger unified data center deployment – remains one of the more difficult changes IT departments face with virtualization. Every virtual platform and tool vendor has their own management platforms for managing their specific resources, but managing virtualization throughout the data center, specifically as part of the application delivery network, has been severely lagging behind other virtualization technologies.

Earlier this year, F5 released its first Management Pack for Microsoft System Center 2007. This initial release enabled customers using System Center to manage their F5 BIG-IP appliances, and their application delivery network, in conjunction with and on the same platform as their other data center system assets. This release provided baseline integration between F5 BIG-IP platforms and System Center by monitoring, automating, and provisioning components of their application delivery network. Although not designed specifically for virtualization, this release marked the first time that the F5 application delivery network could be managed in conjunction with virtual assets also managed by System Center.

On November 3rd F5 announced the next generation Management Pack release, the F5 PRO-enabled Management Pack for Microsoft System Center. Designed to operate with and manage virtual assets, this PRO-enabled release takes the original Management Pack features and drastically expands them to allow much more granular and complete management of F5 appliances and provides true integration with Virtual Machine Manager, the System Center tool for managing Hyper-V virtual platforms. The F5 PRO-enabled Management Pack enhances visibility into both the application delivery network and the Hyper-V virtual server environment.

New F5 PRO-enabled management features include:

• Dynamically adding and removing BIG-IP resources based on:
  • Hyper-V virtual server status
  • Health of applications running on Hyper-V virtual machines
  • Health and availability of the virtual network
• Instructing SCVMM to move Hyper-V virtual machines between production and maintenance mode while bleeding application delivery traffic between virtual machines as needed
• Enhanced GUI and wizards for common tasks
• Pro-active tips to optimize your application delivery network for physical and virtual environments
• …and many more

Related Resources:

• F5 and Microsoft Virtualization Solutions: http://www.f5.com/solutions/applications/microsoft/virtualization/
• How-To in-depth tutorial videos on using the new F5 PRO-enabled Management Pack: http://www.youtube.com/user/f5networksinc#grid/user/724DEFCA1A652881
• F5 PRO-enabled Management Pack DevCentral Resources: http://devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=214

The new F5 PRO-enabled Management Pack for System Center is another tool in the existing suite of F5 Application Ready Solutions for Microsoft Windows Server, including solutions for IIS, Remote Desktop Services (RDS), Hyper-V, and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2. The F5 Pro-enabled Management Pack extends this suite to include managing BIG-IP appliances and Microsoft applications running in both physical and virtual environments. For the first time in the virtualization management space, F5 has created a unified solution that allows users to manage their virtual assets as part of their application delivery network and vise versa, creating one less complex component to managing new virtual deployments. Applications running on Hyper-V virtual machines – and the Hyper-V/Windows 2008 platform as well – are critical components of your application deliver network and should be managed as part of the holistic virtual solution.

And the best part? It’s still FREE! Head over to the F5 Management Pack portal on DevCentral and download a copy and start managing your “virtual application delivery network” today.