The proliferation of virtualization coupled with the increasing power of industry-standard servers and the availability of cloud computing has led to a significant uptick in the number of servers that need to be managed within and without an organization. Where we once made do with racks of physical servers that we could access in the data center down the hall, we now have to manage many more servers that could be spread all over the globe.
This is where data center orchestration and configuration management tools come into play. In many cases, we're managing groups of identical servers, running identical applications and services. They're deployed on virtualization frameworks within the organization, or they're running as cloud or hosted instances in remote data centers. In some cases, we may be talking about large installations that exist only to support very large applications or large installations that support myriad smaller services. In either case, the ability to wave a wand and cause them all to bend to the will of the admin cannot be discounted. It's the only way to manage these large and growing infrastructures.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here