VAS - VMware CMP

Editor's Notes

• #3: Today’s businesses must be fluid and nimble to remain competitive in marketplaces that continually expect change. In the cloud-mobile era, consumers have grown accustomed to speedy, on-demand delivery of goods and services, with businesses like Uber and Postmates delivering on only minutes of lead time. Infrastructure supporting these businesses must be able to meet these same demands for change. In short, this infrastructure must: Support very rapid / continuous deployment of applications Provide on-demand infrastructure services Scale and adapt dynamically based on the needs of applications [Reference] Market Context In the mobile-cloud era, consumers have grown accustomed to speedy, on-demand delivery of goods and services, with businesses like Uber and Postmates delivering with only minutes of lead time. Because of these increased demands, VMware’s traditional market is undergoing several transitions: Increased LOB IT buying power: Through distributed decision-making, IT resources used within a single business can grow diverse, and become difficult to manage and secure. LOBs have gained influence in IT purchasing decisions, diluting the decision-making power of central IT organizations. The result has been more shadow IT, with LOBs using resources of which central IT is largely unaware. Focused investments for future flexibility: IT organizations are expected to meet the usual security, compliance, and availability challenges, but also to invest in agile infrastructure that adapts to new developments, like more efficient software architectures and tools. Increased Rate of Business Change: Cloud-mobile markets require infrastructure that supports on-demand, rapid, continuous deployment of applications, and that can scale dynamically based on need, and handle sudden pivots in customer expectations. Continued growth of big data: As business adoption of location-targeting, mobile, and cloud technologies grows, so will the data collected by these businesses. Where an early point-of-sales system might record value, timestamp, and static location associated with a transaction, a mobile e-commerce transaction may record operating system, mobile provider, phone model, variable location, and many other data points as well. Customer Challenges The market conditions noted above – increased LOB influence, focused investments for flexibility, rapid business change, and even more big data– result in several challenges for VMware’s customers. These include: Managing and controlling diverse infrastructure: IT organizations today need oversight, management, and control of a wide array of solutions across several platforms. As businesses utilize a wider set of IT solutions, and control diffuses away from a single organization into many, companies face greater challenges monitoring and managing a diverse set of IT resources. Legacy system integrations and vendor choice: Infrastructure solutions purchased today must be robust enough to support business as usual, but flexible enough to allow choice and optimization for each customer now, and in the future. Security: Applications, remote workers, bring-your-own-device policies, and public cloud usage introduced by increased LOB influence in IT purchasing all introduce additional entities for monitoring, each of which must be quickly isolated and addressed in the event of a security breach. Maintaining high availability and service levels: As the volume and variety of data expands, infrastructure becomes more diverse, and customers' service expectations grow, companies require more resilient resources to maintain high service and availability levels.
• #4: IT organizations can no longer focus solely on the delivery of IT services. As they move to cloud, IT organizations need to transform their role into “brokers of IT services,” operating as a strategic partner to the business offering IT as a Service. And “cloud” is the key technology that will enable this new operating model. Many IT organizations are building a private cloud in order to be more agile and responsive. However, IT will need to increasingly rely more on external service providers as well to deliver IT services that scale to meet business demand and respond to market changes. As a result, successful enterprises will be those that understand how to multi-source (on-premises/off-premises, private/public/ hybrid cloud) and manage a hybrid / heterogeneous IT environment, integrating it into their business. As a broker, IT will enable LOBs to make fact-based decisions on service consumption and provisioning based on real-time visibility into criteria such as the the cost, health, security and compliance status of services. Of course, we’re not completely there yet, but that is our goal and we’ve already achieved that in a few areas such as cost and health visibility.
• #5: VMware helps to deliver the foundation for IT-as-a-Service with the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC), enabling the CIO to transition IT to becoming a true Broker of IT Services. The SDDC is the ideal architecture for: building, delivering, and managing business applications, and building and operating private, public, and hybrid clouds, where all infrastructure is virtualized and delivered as a service, and the control of this data center is entirely automated by software and enables the delivery of IT-as-a-Service. The SDDC enables customers to utilize the investments in people, process, and technology that they’ve already made to deliver both legacy and new applications while meeting vital IT responsibilities. It allows businesses to use what they have today to build for change in the future. VMware’s SDDC solutions provide a unified platform across the hybrid cloud, built on VMware’s best-in-class compute, storage, and networking virtualization technologies. It includes the industry-leading cloud-management platform, as well as programmatic management capabilities via OpenStack and infrastructure-level APIs. The Cloud Management Platform (CMP) becomes the key control layer in a SDDC to manage heterogeneous and hybrid environments. With policy-based automation, operations, and business management capabilities, it helps IT to deliver on the new business need for speed, agility, and choice while also delivering the ongoing IT need for control and efficiency. Traditional tools and processes that infrastructure and operations teams are using aren’t optimized to deliver on the promise of the software-defined data center and hybrid cloud. Businesses need a cloud management platform that simplifies and accelerates infrastructure and application delivery and ongoing management onsite in their data center and in the cloud. VMware’s Cloud Management Platform (CMP) is purpose-built for the hybrid cloud. It provides a comprehensive management stack that enables IT to deliver infrastructure and applications quickly on vSphere and other hypervisors, physical infrastructure, and private and public clouds, all with the control IT needs.   VMware’s CMP is distinctive, by offering NOT ONLY Automation, BUT ALSO integrating Operations and Business capabilities into a single platform to provide performance and financial insight to improve IT/Business decision-making and alignment. This helps IT to accomplish its mission as a Broker of IT Services, by enabling IT to source, provision, and manage the lifecycle of IT services across the new data center landscape: multi-platform, hybrid cloud, and multiple providers. Automation – self-service provision infrastructure and applications across multiple hypervisors, private and public cloud with both speed and control Operations – manage infrastructure and applications in physical, virtual, and cloud environments with integrated capacity, performance, log, and configuration management Business – align IT spending with business priorities by getting full transparency of infrastructure and application service cost and quality Unified Management – use a common set of tools across on-premises and public clouds with a unified management experience and fast time to value In short, the cloud management platform supports cloud administration, server administration, fabric, and operations teams working with lines of business to ensure agility, application SLAs, and infrastructure efficiency with control. The platform combines automated delivery, intelligent operations, and business insight to deliver a unified cloud management experience across hybrid clouds and heterogeneous environments. [Reference] Background on VMware Strategy These three form the basis of the three strategies for VMware: the Software-Defined Data Center, the hybrid cloud, and end-user computing. A year and a half ago, we laid out this vision of these three components as our strategy, and since then we have been diligently executing upon all three of them. It's gone from vision to instantiation, and now powerful realization across all three of them. These three together are the path to the software-defined enterprise, and we're very proud of the progress that we've made here. There’s much yet to do, but we are on a journey to execute the software-defined enterprise, building on these three components. Overview: The Software-Defined Data Center – An Open, Industry Architecture The architecture that provides the competitive advantage sought by today’s businesses is the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC). The SDDC is an open architecture that extends the principles of virtualization – abstraction, pooling, and automation – beyond compute to the rest of the data center, bringing deployment and resource management to any infrastructure and cloud environments of your choice. This in turn enables the management and orchestration for all IT services needed in the mobile-cloud era. As the leader in compute virtualization through its industry standard vSphere product, VMware is the company best positioned to extend virtualization solutions to the rest of the data center. VMware’s SDDC solutions deliver cloud service provider economics in the data center, as well as fast and agile application provisioning that responds to ever-changing business demands. VMware’s SDDC solutions offer the right availability and security for each application with policy-based governance, and the ability to run new and existing applications across multiple platforms or clouds. VMware’s Software-Defined Data Center Solutions consists of four components: a completely virtualized infrastructure across compute, network, and storage; delivered on- or off-premises in a hybrid cloud; a comprehensive virtualization and cloud management platform; choice in cloud frameworks, whether a fully integrated VMware stack or OpenStack-based
• #6: An integrated platform approach – shared services across automation, operations, and business functions, breaks down operational silos and provides IT with the ability to leverage business and operational insight to improve decisions around IT/Business alignment and take action in an agile manner with control. This enables IT to effectively improve on-going lifecycle management as a broker of IT services. [As you click through the animation, explain:] Our CMP enables users to take operational insight around performance, health, compliance of your workloads from both structured and unstructured (log) data, combine that with financial insight provided by our cloud business management and benchmarking capabilities so that you can make the rights decisions with respect to what services to provision and where, on-premise on your private cloud or in the public cloud.
• #7: Why do we need a Platform? A comprehensive cloud management platform with integrated automation, operations and business capabilities delivers insights and visibility that is otherwise not possible with point products, as well as higher levels of efficiency and agility. Integrations among the cloud automation, operations, and business capabilities within the Cloud Management Platform include: Service cost – infrastructure service costs calculated by Business are made available to consumers in the Automation service portal/catalog; also, Business analyzes service cost and usage based on Automation entities, e.g., tenant, business group, blueprint, VM Service optimization –Business identifies potential cost savings via Operations wastage data; infrastructure teams can figure out how much it’s costing to support unused capacity, and identify infrastructure reclamation, consolidation and migration opportunities Service agility – Leveraging data from Operations, administrators can see the health status of their VMs in a list view in Automation and then drill down to look at the status of individual VMs; once they understand what the problem is they can take corrective action using available day-2 actions (e.g., adding additional resources or changing network or storage configurations); also, the effort required to reclaim inactive and abandoned resources can be significantly reduced; Operations identifies potentially inactive VMs and passes this information to Automation which then coordinates the process of verifying if the machine is still needed; if it is not, Automation executes the policy-based reclamation process The power of the common platform is delivered through analytics, shared information and policies across the entire lifecycle of infrastructure and application services. Specifically, the platform’s improved visibility into infrastructure health optimizes provisioning decisions while tenant-aware monitoring ensures SLAs and accelerates troubleshooting and remediation. Reclamation and resource right-sizing based on shared information across day-one provisioning and day-two operations continuously improve utilization. Capacity planning determined by reservation policies and tenant views enables IT teams to stay ahead of demand and improve forecasting. Data from automation and operations combined with business insight ensure intelligent placement and optimal sourcing decisions. A platform-based solution with a shared service model delivers the most effective way to manage Software-Defined Datacenter environments where compute, network and storage resources are virtualized and controlled by software. It also provides a unified management experience where traditional and modern applications may be located on-site or in a public cloud. And it offers the ability to provide key services to both service consumers and service providers (e.g., health status, resource reclamation).
• #8: Lets look in a bit more detail, where the savings are possible. Our first savings area is Improving Operational Efficiency Even with virtualization, most companies still spend 4-6 hours over 3-4 days bringing new compute resources online or making changes to existing resources.
• #9: Automating Infrastructure delivery is often the first step for most companies, but what if you need more than just a virtual machine? What if you need a multi-tier application? <Click> Usually this means more silos, more manual processing and longer wait times. Many companies tell us it can take 2-3 weeks to deploy a multi-tier application Then there is the ongoing challenge of keeping these independent deployments in synch as changes are made. <Click> The result is more silos and manual processing resulting in longer waits and frequently incompatibilities in Dev, Test and Production environments which impact the ability to deliver high quality solutions.
• #10: Ok, so how do we enable those use cases – at the feature / function level? As mentioned earlier, our solution has been in production for years at some of the most complex and advanced IT shops in the world…we have developed a rich set of OOB capabilities. Lets take a few minutes and go through the major highlights of these features… Important to note that this functionality applies to Server or Desktop cloud – physical or virtual platforms – private or public resources. BUILD OUT TO SHOW FABRIC, SELF-SERVICE & DYNAMIC CLOUD INTERFACE CLOUD SERVICE CATALOG & PORTAL: We provide an intuitive and personalized self-service experience for cloud consumers. The appearance and behavior of the front end can be branded and configured to match your organizations needs. DYNAMIC CLOUD INTERFACE: This interface provides a secure, Web enabled API for programmatic access to cloud data and services. Furthermore, we can dynamically generate this secure RESTful API for third party tools and homegrown systems to create a unified and secure interface across the datacenter. BUILD OUT TO SHOW COSTING & RESOURCE MNGT CLOUD SERVICE COSTING: We allow your organization to chargeback/show back for its cloud services by measuring each business unit or consumer's infrastructure, software, and storage costs. We provide a variety of out of the box reports as well as an accessible data model for 3rd party reporting or billing systems. INTELLIGENT RESOURCE MANAGEMENT: The features here enable you to discover and organize your infrastructure fabric into tiers and allocate resources to multiple consumers. This enables intelligent policy-driven placement and full visibly into fabric consumption. BUILD OUT TO SHOW ORCHESTRATION & ORG AWARENESS MULTI-VENDOR ORCHESTRATION: vCloud Automation Center includes a highly scalable .NET Windows Workflow based orchestration engine that enables end-to-end life cycle management of cloud resources. Our engine abstracts the business logic from the technical integration we allow you the flexibility to change underlying components easily...we do this without impacting your end users. USER & ORGANIZATIONAL AWARENESS: The platform provides comprehensive RBAC that natively integrates with Active Directory. The allows for true organizational awareness which impacts the services and life cycle that each user can consume and manage. (may need to edit this one a bit) BUILD OUT TO SHOW AUTOMATION AUTOMATION ENGINE: We can automate a variety of provisioning mechanisms across multiple hardware and platform types. We also support native integration to third party tools such as SCCM, BladeLogic and HP Opsware. BUILD OUT TO SHOW EXTENSIBILITY (DESIGN CENTER ONLY): ABILITY TO ADAPT & EXTEND THESE OOB CAPABILITIES: So along with the OOB capabilities our suite ships with a visual workflow design utility called “vCloud Automation Center Designer”. This provides a non-developer the ability to easily extend our functionality to adapt to your specific processes and tools. This is critical in order to quickly and cost effectively achieve the desired future state discussed earlier… An great example of this is our implementation at GE. One of the GE admins (non-developer) took our foundation training class and ON HIS OWN integrated vCloud Automation Center with ServiceNow (their ticketing system) in LESS THAN AN HOUR… BUILD OUT TO SHOW CDK: DELIVER COMPLETELY NEW CLOUD SERVICES LEVERAGING OUR PLATFORM: Now the next level of Extensibility is aimed at our most advanced customers who want to leverage our platform – but allow their in-house developers who have .NET or Windows Workflow experience to quickly deliver completely new use cases outside of Cloud life cycle management. They are able to deliver these new services on top of our unique architecture. SUMMARIZE BEFORE GOING TO NEXT SLIDE – DEFINITELY ENGAGE AUDIENCE – WHICH ONES ARE RELEVANT, WHY, QUESTIONS ON THESE CAPABILITIES, ETC: All of these capabilities work across your internal physical & virtual infrastructures – as well as public cloud resources…today we have Amazon out of the box, however we have done integrations with Saavis and others and will continue to productize these as customer demand dictates. (GOOD SPOT HERE TO ENGAGE TO GET DETAILS ON THEIR ENVIRONMENTS – INTERNAL AND CLOUD, CURRENT AND FUTURE.
• #11: vCAC supports a multi-vendor, Multi-cloud Infrastructure that allows IT services to be delivered across a wide range of multi-vendor, virtual, physical, and cloud platforms. vCAC can easily be configured to work with each of these infrastructure platforms by configuring vendor specific configuration parameters.
• #13: Let us look now into the application services capabilities of vCloud Automation Center. Here you see a screen shot for Application Blueprints. An application blueprint describes the deployment topology of an application. In other words, an application blueprint describes a model of a integrated multi-tier application, which can be deployed into various clouds. An application blueprint is based on the principle of loosely coupling and it allows you to abstract the application from the infrastructure. This provides unprecedented choice in terms of what infrastructure should be chosen to best fit the requirements of the application. An application blueprint is assembled by dragging and dropping components (i.e. services) into the canvas. Traditionally applications were deployed using an approach, in which the business opens a ticket, hardware is selected, procured, installed and configured, followed by the installation, configuration and testing of each application. This process often leads to deployment times of weeks or months, and the response to the business is slow. Here only he application architect, rather than dozens of people or teams are required to deploy applications. The deployment and update process is greatly streamlined. The components / services of the blueprint are reusable and pre-built so there is no need to re-create them over and over again. Organizations can standardize their software stack (what SW to use, what versions, configurations etc..) using those components, which is important for effective automation. The quality of services improves by capturing best practices or gold standards in the components. Once an application model has been created, it can be re-deployed on demand by consumers across clouds. Streamlining the deployment process using pre-built components and re-using application models all leads to accelerating application deployment times. The Blueprint provides a master template so that all applications deployed into dev, test or production are configured in exactly the same way. This eliminates a big source of configuration differences, which require time intense manual rework. Of course it is possible to make changes to standard configurations within specific deployment blueprints as needed.
• #14: Connectivity Connect to pre-created NSX Virtual Distributed Router for optimized east-west traffic Support NSX edge router, which adds overlapping IP addresses across apps Security Isolate multi-machine service to only allow traffic between VMs within that service On-demand security by applying pre-defined NSX security policies (e.g. distributed firewall, 3rd party solutions) to instantiated VMs. Select NSX security tags for dynamic security service consumption (e.g. DB servers, PCI, etc.) based on type of workload. Availability Support for on-demand (one-armed model) and pre-created NSX load balancer Support for 3rd party NSX Partner Load Balancing services
• #15: So how do we enable all this with the VR Ops Platform? At a high-level, the VR Ops platform encapsulates the analytics that can draw from a number of data sources – partners like EMC, for example, are already building extensions to provide visibility into VNX and other storage arrays. VR Ops also has native monitoring capabilities to feed vSphere, OS and application data into our analytics. The analytics then drive proactive smart alerts, dashboards, recommendations and remediation workflows. The integrated management capabilities work like modules that add more functionality depending on the edition you’re using. The dashboards provide visibility using role-based access to customizable dashboards. It’s important to note that the VR Ops platform provides heterogeneous management capabilities, meaning that we support virtual and physical infrastructure as well as VMs running on other hypervisors and public clouds like Amazon.
• #19: In the screenshot, there are a couple of recommendations for the alert and we can remediate that with two recommendation “Move VMs to other host clusters” and “Power-off non business critical VMs.” For one of these recommendations, an action has been assigned to it. Power off VMs. We can perform this action.
• #20: Administrators can see the health status of their VMs is a list view and then drill down to look at the status of individual VMs. Once they understand what the problem is they can take corrective action using the day-2 actions made available for that resources. This includes things like adding additional resources, network, or storage configurations. Note: vRealize Operation Health badges in a list view are only provided to vRealize Automation Tenant Administrators. In 6.2 individual users will not see the health status in their list views. All users when they drill to view individual VM details we see health status as well as the reasons for the health of that VMs. Expanded alerts and
• #21: Today, I wanted to go over with you three very common scenarios that vSphere with Operations Management can address: Performance Resolution, Capacity Management, and Future Planning.
• #22: Performance Resolution is all about addressing performance issues when they arise. That is, if something goes wrong in your data center that affects performance, you want the ability to quickly diagnose the problem and start the remediation process.
• #23: This is the world view of vCenter Operations Manager. You can think of it as your command center that offers a unified dashboard for monitoring the health, risk, and efficiency of your data center. By viewing the badges that Hanish went over earlier, we can see that currently overall things are relatively healthy, there is a little risk and we are relatively efficient. <CLICK> But… We’ve been hearing some complaints about a certain VM… <CLICK> We search the VM to investigate.
• #29: The next scenario that I’ll go over is capacity management. Managing capacity really is key to keeping the business going. If you ever run out of capacity, parts of your business may slow down drastically.
• #30: Here we are again in our World View. This time we will do a capacity management exercise. <CLICK> We notice that our health and efficiency are in relatively good shape <CLICK> but this time we see that the Risk Badge is High. <CLICK> We will investigate by clicking on the arrow below. <CLICK>
• #31: We see we are 6 VM’s over capacity based on the applied policy leaving us with 0 time remaining. We also see that the reason for our over capacity is because we ran out of memory. <CLICK> We click on the Capacity remaining badge to see more details. <CLICK>
• #32: On the planning tab go to “Views” and Select “Capacity” <CLICK> Then select “Virtual Machine Capacity”. <CLICK> We again see in red that we have Zero time remaining because we have run out capacity. This is going to give us huge problems if we don’t remedy it soon. <CLICK> Let’s figure out a scenario that will fix this problem Click the “Create New Scenario” link on the right under “What-if Analysis” <CLICK>
• #33: We will be prompted into a series of screen that asks us what we want to plan for. <CLICK> Select “Hosts and Datastores” and click Next <CLICK> Let’s add two hosts. <CLICK> We won’t be adding any datastores today. <CLICK> This is summary screen of our changes. Note that in this example we are adding two hosts with different configurations. This is just to illustrate the point that it is perfectly okay to do this. Click finalize and we are done.
• #34: This is the screen you will see after creating the scenario. On this screen you will be able to see the Actual capacity <CLICK> And Compared with the scenario that you just created. <CLICK> You can see that the scenario is applied and the results are shown. This change would take the cluster from being overprovisioned by 6 VMs to having enough spare capacity to support 4.2 more VMs. Based on this, you know the way to fix the problem is to add more servers that will give you the CPU and memory you need to support your capacity requirements.
• #35: This is the screen you will see after creating the scenario. On this screen you will be able to see the Actual capacity <CLICK> And Compared with the scenario that you just created. <CLICK> You can see that the scenario is applied and the results are shown. This change would take the cluster from being overprovisioned by 6 VMs to having enough spare capacity to support 4.2 more VMs. Based on this, you know the way to fix the problem is to add more servers that will give you the CPU and memory you need to support your capacity requirements.
• #36: The last scenario that we would like to go over today is Future Planning. This is all about planning for the future so that you can be proactive and address issues before they become a problem.
• #37: vSphere with Operations Management has a great tool that allows you to plan for the future with Trend analysis. In the previous scenario, you saw what-if analysis base on taking a certain action. Here you see trends charts that can look into the future and help you determine how much time you have remaining before you run out of capacity. Here you see a view of the tool with your current VM count capacity and number of VMs that you have deployed. <CLICK> You also see based on your usage at what point in the future you will run out of capacity. <CLICK> Now let’s say that you need to add 10 new VMs. Notice that the point that your current capacity will run out shifts to account for this. This type of trend analysis ensures that you can you plan for the future and always have the capacity you need when you need it. When you are able to address problems before they arise, you keep the your business critical applications available and your business running closing the gap between business expectations and the ability of IT to deliver.
• #38: Using the Business Management capabilities it is possible to derive the cost of services within 15-30 min. It is often a major challenge for customers to define service costs, but here we can auto-generate a rate card, which leverages out of box costing information. The rate card can be updated to reflect the actual costs on case they differ from the out of box content. The costing model provides full transparency of how the service costs were derived, which is very important to ensure credibility. The service costs can be broken down into the various cost drivers. It is also possible to view the cost of a VM or view the cost by demand (i.e. consumer group)
• #39: We can also compare the service costs based on whether the service runs in the private cloud or the public cloud. We interface with e.g. Amazon AWS to pull down pricing information. Also here transparency into the cost model is very important to provide credibility when comparing costs in different delivery models. The ability to compare service costs based on the delivery model allows IT to become a service broker for the business. It is now in a strong position to justify services to run in-house and for cases where services can run cheaper in the public cloud IT can now easily identify those cost – saving opportunities.
• #40: VMware delivers the capabilities needed to be successful in the mobile cloud era through three major strategic initiatives. First is the Software-Defined Data Center, the architecture for the Mobile-Cloud era. Then, Hybrid Cloud services, which maximize flexibility for private and public cloud deployment models. And third, a virtual workspace to support the needs of an ever-changing mobile workforce.