I wanted to take a quick poll from some of you out there to help me understand something. With all the work I have done with the Nicira Layer 2 Gateway, as well as the vCloud Connector Data Center Extension, the concept of extending your network to the cloud always comes up. As an ex-administrator myself I can certainly see a small number of real, true uses cases where you would without a doubt, have to extend the network. Off the top of my head this would be:
- Licenses tied to a MAC address
- Applications hard-coded to IP
- Lack of DNS control preventing DNS Updates
- Disaster Recovery (Maybe but not so much)
What I am struggling with is outside of these what makes this so attractive and a “must have” for you? I have never really had an issue as an administrator changing IP address, albeit it’s a PITA, but it’s not impossible. That being said would the scenarios above really be the first things you would try to move to the cloud in a hybrid scenario? I would think you’d go after something easier like net new Infrastructure with a site to site VPN or MPLS to the cloud. Migrating existing virtual machines that are not tied to their IP should be also easy to deal with.
So I take it to you all, to help me identify more “Must Have” reasons to extend your network into the cloud. Are there really reasons to have every network on premise in your cloud or is it really isolated to some of these one-off use cases? Everyone wants to do it but when I keep asking “Why?”, usually it is just because they “want to” not because they “have to”. That tells me maybe it’s more about making it easier, but really how hard is it to change an IP address? If it’s that hard, isn’t that an issue with the application design?
Please chime in, I’m curious to start a discussion about this, and get some more valid “Why’s” to this question. As always I am curious to start a spirited discussion on this topic, so please leave your comments below.