Looking for the heart to proceed with your stumbling virtualization plans? The brains to figure out how to deal with unchecked proliferation? The courage to tell your C-levels that no, Amazon E3 isn’t the answer to all of life’s problems?

Then Interop was the right place to be this week, as vendors pitched their roadmaps and panelists promised access to a sane (or at least saner) way to transition from your current server architecture to a more scalable, agile, cloud-like infrastructure without the security risks or loss of control.

And while the focus was on achieving the benefits of the cloud, the strategies presented were often grounded in virtualization fundamentals, paving a more organic path on the way to the fabled Oz of IT.

Acknowledging Shortcomings

The quest for cloudiness begins, in large part, because of virtualization’s limitations, at least as it is largely implemented. Server virtualization was an early no-brainer due to the ability to drastically save on CapEx spending: Instead of buying 3 servers, which each used about 50% of their load at any given time, you could buy 2, and distribute one of those servers, virtualized, to whichever physical machine was under the least load at the time.

Or better yet, stuff 50 servers on one high device and save on not only server costs, but also server room space, power, cooling … The savings were immediate and tangible.

But the time spent managing these devices didn’t decrease alongside the original savings, and so while there were some ongoing savings (reduced cooling and power, for example), virtualization stalled out as far as the benefits it could offer, particularly since a virtualized environment offered a host of new challenges that IT hadn’t run into before, including the difficulty of troubleshooting a server when you might not even know where it is physically, or how to check and monitor machine-to-machine traffic effectively and efficiently.

“We were wildly successful, and we didn’t figure out all these problems,” said Jerry McCloud, director of marketing at VMware. ”We [now] see all the issues, we know all the issues, and quite frankly, we have all the issues.”

Click your heels three times

Fortunately, even as virtualization was finding wide acceptance, top minds were working on ensuring that the new tools didn’t just pile new problems on top of the old ones.

Andi Mann, VP of marketing with CA and author of Visible Ops Private Cloud, said that companies need to work to evolve their virtualization activities along a sensible path.

1. Consolidation: The first stage of a virtualization strategy, in which hardware is consolidated using basic virtualization technologies. This is where you see the CapEx gains mentioned earlier.

2. Optimization: Start using infrastructure automation tools to ensure that the system self-tunes itself from time to time, ensuring best practices and sensible deployments throughout your virtualized infrastructure without manual intervention.

3. Orchestration: A deeper automation of a wider variety of tasks, including the ramp up of new services and servers. This is where business agility benefits begin to kick in, reducing deployment times and cost while reducing human error.

4. Dynamic IT: Welcome to Oz, where new services are up and running in days and where IT can sit contentedly back, watching the glorious green uptime fruits of its labors.

Does this virtualization road map make sense to you? Do you see your virtualized efforts becoming more cloud-like, on purpose or through coincidence? Is this just more marketing buzzwork as entrenched players push back against the likes of Amazon? We’d love to hear your take, below in the comments or directly to me via e-mail.

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

By almost all accounts, the “news” at this year’s Interop was light. Many of the products being demo’d from the major players like Cisco and HP are, for the most part, reheated announcements of products that are already on the market, evolutions of their current offerings. The grumbling was palpable in the press room, but maybe it’s a good thing we’re not seeing the launch of too many brand new platforms.

Instead, every vendor is focusing on how they’re working to make their current portfolio easier to deploy, manage and monitor: The new Cisco Flex 7500 Series Cloud Controller, as Shamus McGillicuddy writes, helps remotely manage thousands of wireless branch office Access Points (APs) and tens of thousands of devices.

Cisco also was demoing how Cisco PRIME offers improvement management options, making it easy to quickly and visually drill down into network problem areas, apply a fix and move on. The demo was impressive (we’ll hopefully have video up later so you can see for yourself), but as noted elsewhere, Cisco’s playing catchup when it comes to ease of management. Despite a bum of a keynote, HP has delivered on its underlying promise: A simpler, single-pane management experience that extends across vendors. It’s FlexManagement management suite supports over 2,600 types of network products, almost half of which are Cisco, and looks like it has some fantastic rollback and deployment tools. And with its underlying JUNOS platform, simplicity and consistency has always been at the heart of Juniper’s offerings, making its recently unveiled offering of enterprise edge routers a natural fit for companies that are already on the Juniper bandwagon.

Wherever you look, there seems to be an understanding that networking companies need to start making network, database and server admins’ lives easier, giving more time to focus on improving IT’s service offerings and less time understanding why its current ones are on the fritz.

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

Michael Kerner’s take sums up what a lot of people were thinking: Juniper’s suffered a serious blow, and Cisco’s likely to be able to take his knowledge and rapidly iterate their own answer to QFabric. Shamus McGillicuddy at SearchNetworking got a more nuanced view from Tom Nolle:

Still, some analysts believe Yen’s departure is more of a gain for Cisco than a loss for Juniper.

“I know and respect David, but Pradeep [Sindu, Juniper CTO] has had the guiding role in Juniper’s activities, especially QFabric,” said Tom Nolle, president of research firm CIMI Corporation. “The underlying semiconductor chipset has long been completed and there is not likely going to be an interruption on the QFabric release.”

For Cisco, however, Yen’s deep technology background sends an important message that the company will better focus on tech strategy.

It’s unlikely Yen will bring any Juniper trade secrets Cisco’s way – even if Cisco’s architecture could support whatever technical knowledge he’d bring over, the risk of a crippling lawsuit would be ever present - but he brings something much more valuable and needed by Cisco right now: The ability to turn things around. After John Chambers’ humbling admission that Cisco has been stumbling, it makes sense to bring in a veteran who, in just three years, dramatically raised Juniper’s profile and technical execution, and who had previously helped guide Sun into becoming a respectable enterprise service company.

With Juniper’s QFabric gaining ground and Cisco’s determination to refocus on its core enterprise customers, it looks like HP got its wish for more competition.

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

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