What is virtual infrastructure management? And how can automation help?

Virtual infrastructure management is the coordination of software, IT resources, and other tools to manage virtual machines and related IT environments throughout their entire lifecycle.

Many companies rely on virtualization technology. It offers more scalability and flexibility than traditional IT infrastructure, while supporting many applications. But managing virtual machines (VMs) and other virtualized infrastructure components can still be challenging. Regardless of how many VMs your organization runs and how complex your environments are, adopting a comprehensive management solution can make things easier.

Automation plays an important role in virtual infrastructure management. You can automate many of the tasks and processes required to manage VMs and related infrastructure components. This approach reduces the need for repeated, manual work that takes time and focus away from other business priorities. Event-driven automation can also help you automatically respond to changing IT conditions, which helps to reduce Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) and ensure smooth operations.

Automate your VM migration

To understand what virtual infrastructure is, it’s important to define its relationship to traditional IT infrastructure—the software and hardware components needed to operate and manage IT environments and services.

Software includes packaged and home-grown applications, databases, web servers, operating systems (like Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®), and management tools. Hardware includes physical components like servers, storage systems, networking equipment, computers, and peripheral devices. And since hardware needs to be housed somewhere, IT infrastructure can also refer to onsite facilities like datacenters or server rooms.

Virtual infrastructure includes many of the same capabilities as traditional infrastructure. But instead of being defined by its physical components, virtual infrastructure is made up of a software-defined environment—usually a VM. This environment is described as software-defined because it’s created by an application, called a hypervisor, and abstracted from the physical hardware on which it runs.

In a traditional environment, hardware is often dedicated to a single application or purpose—and, as a result, is rarely used at full capacity. But with virtualization, you can use a hypervisor to allocate your physical resources across multiple, isolated VMs. Each of these virtual machines can have a dedicated purpose, but since the hypervisor can distribute compute resources like CPU, memory, and storage to multiple VMs, you don’t need as many physical machines to support your IT operations. This means you can consolidate physical hardware so you only use what you need.

Using fewer physical resources means you pay less for hardware, electricity, physical security, and facility costs. And since you don’t need to worry about purchasing more hardware when you need to deploy a new environment, virtual infrastructure is also easier to scale than traditional infrastructure. For example, you can quickly increase or decrease CPU usage in response to fluctuations in demand without having to set up additional hardware.

Virtual infrastructure management involves all of the tasks required to set up VMs and keep virtual environments running as intended.

VM migration

There are several reasons to migrate a VM. You might move a VM to a new host when you have to upgrade, add, or remove hardware devices on the existing host, or when you need to make a strategic decision to lower costs. This could involve migrating to an on-premises solution or to the cloud. Or, you might identify a host that is underutilized and move a VM onto it if the current host is overloaded. You might also migrate a VM to a different geographical location to achieve lower latency.

Day 2 management tasks

Once you’ve deployed or migrated a VM, you need to manage tasks on your virtualization platform of choice. Automation can help with full lifecycle operations to ensure that your virtual infrastructure continues to run as intended. These include:

• Modifying operating system settings.
• Installing software updates.
• Applying security patches.
• Creating, managing, and restoring VM snapshots and backups.
• Re-allocating resources, like vCPU, memory, and storage.
• Changing network adaptor settings.
• Maintaining an inventory of all VMs.
• De-emphasizing unused VMs through deprovisioning or moving them to lower-cost options.

Orchestration

In addition to VMs, you also need to coordinate and manage any related infrastructure—such as compute resources, networks, and cloud services. And if you’re operating multiple environments, you’ll need to be able to orchestrate management tasks across domains—this is often aided by a unified management tool or solution, like Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform.

Learn more about virtual machines

Automation plays an important role in virtual infrastructure management. Completing management tasks manually is time-consuming and inefficient. And when you repeat manual tasks often, you’re more likely to make mistakes that can take even more time to fix. By automating the tasks involved in virtual infrastructure management, you can keep VM sprawl under control, quickly scale VMs to meet current business demand, and minimize the amount of time you spend fixing errors.

In particular, automation can help you:

• Migrate VMs more efficiently and scale migrations up or down.
• Enforce standard configurations and rulesets when provisioning VMs.
• Orchestrate tasks across multi-vendor, multi-domain environments.
• Replace manual management processes with fully automated workflows.
• Update configurations and install applications with ease.
• Manage related infrastructure—like network, storage, and more—in similar ways.

Learn how to migrate from VMware to Red Hat OpenShift with Ansible Automation Platform. Video duration: 2:25.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform includes everything you need to build, deploy, and manage end-to-end automation at scale for virtual infrastructure or any IT management need. It can help you migrate VMs to Red Hat OpenShift® Virtualization, a modern application platform–based on the open source projects KVM and Kubevirt–that can run virtual machines and containers side by side.

And once you’ve migrated your virtual infrastructure, Ansible Automation Platform can help you manage Day 2 operations throughout the entire VM lifecycle on OpenShift Virtualization or your platform of choice. You can automate ongoing management tasks and orchestrate VMs with existing IT infrastructure, including essential components like networks, cloud services, databases, and IT service management (ITSM) tools.

If you’re just getting started with automation, you can use Ansible Content Collections to build automation jobs that help you manage and orchestrate VMs, regardless of where they’re running. You can access over 170 certified and validated content collections from Red Hat and our partners with an active Red Hat subscription.

Learn to automate migrations with Ansible Automation Platform