1. A method comprising: receiving at a network device, resource information comprising attributes for compute resources and storage resources in a network; storing said compute resources attributes and said storage resources attributes; identifying a need for provisioning a virtual element comprising a virtual machine or virtual storage; and selecting one of said compute and storage resources for use in provisioning said virtual element; wherein selecting one of said compute and storage resources comprises analyzing said resource information for said compute resources and said storage resources in the network such that said attributes for said compute resources and said storage resources are used to identify optimum placement of the virtual element, said resource information comprising network topology information identifying relative attributes for said compute resources and said storage resources, said relative attributes comprising a path redundancy metric between the virtual machine and the virtual storage for identifying multiple paths from the virtual machine to the virtual storage.