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Using vCloud Automation Center with Infoblox IPAM

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Assigning an IP address and a DNS host record  need to be accomplished during the provisioning process.  VMware vCloud Automation Center supports a number of methods for assigning IP addresses.  These include dynamically assigning them via DHCP,  statically assigning them from a pool of IP addresses stored in vCAC network profiles or allocating them from a custom database.

Many companies use Infoblox IP Address Management  (IPAM) to simplify and automate the process of IP address management.   Infoblox provides a vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) plug-in that can be called from vCloud Automation Center to automate the end-to-end provisioning process including the process of providing an IP address (IPv4 or IPv6) and assigning a DNS host record.    The result is virtual machines provisioned in a matter of minutes instead of days without the errors that can be introduced by manual processing.  The Infoblox plug-in also automates the process of de-allocating an IP address if a virtual machine is deleted as well as removing its DNS host record

Resources
Here are some additional resources to help you better understand the capabilities delivered in this integrated solution and also how to download and configure the Infoblox plug-in to work with vCloud Automation Center.

This and other vCO plug-ins that work with vCloud Automation Center can be found on VMware Solutions Exchange.

IT Innovation Just Got Easier in the Cloud

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IT Innovation just got easier in the cloud
In the latest installation of the Innovation series on the ReThink IT blog, Ramin Sayar, VP of Products & Strategy at VMware, discusses how to build a pathway to innovation by following 5 short – but impactful – principles including:

• Focus on What’s Important
• Rely on Standardization
• Calculate Your Baseline
• It’s All About the Data
• Strive for Visibility and Transparency

By following the above principles, IT execs not only put their organizations on the pathway to innovation, but also boost their reputation in the company. Read more at https://blogs.vmware.com/rethinkit/ to learn how you can build an action plan for innovation.

Now Available: vCenter Operations Manager 5.7

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We are excited to announce the release of vCenter Operations Manager version 5.7, which is the key component of vCenter Operations Management Suite, and provides you with operations dashboards to gain deep insights and visibility into health, risk and efficiency of your infrastructure, and also includes performance management and capacity optimization capabilities.

With this latest release, vCenter Operations Manager 5.7 comes with robust enhancements including:

  • Allocation-based Capacity Planning
  • Greater Scalability
  • New and Improved Widgets

Let’s take a look at these in more detail below. You can also check out this video that provides an overview of the new features and enhancements. Continue reading →

Improve IT Operational Efficiency by as much as 80% with Cloud Service Provisioning

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Provisioning machines takes more time and effort than you think.

We find that most companies we talk to spend an average of 4-6 man hours over multiple days to provision a new IT resource. For some, those days can stretch over weeks. For ongoing management tasks, a similar effort is required. These delays aren’t uncommon, nor are they immune to the cloud where everything seems to happen much faster. A Gartner survey shows 68% of those polled (86 respondents) indicated that it took a day or more to provision their virtual machines. For VMware’s own IT organization, a group that serves a world-class R&D organization and is very much kept to a high standard, stated that provisioning took anywhere from 3 days to 8 weeks.

This is shocking because most of us know it only takes 5-10 minutes to clone a virtual machine and a few minutes more to spin that VM back up. But it’s the details that take time. The cloning VM task often represents less than 10 % of the total effort required to provision a new system for a user. Continue reading →

Building a Business Case for a Private Cloud

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There is an undeniable force impacting IT, and much like in nature, it is all starting with a cloud. Companies embracing cloud computing are reaping benefits. Their IT infrastructures are transforming into dynamic, self-service environment where their customers can request and automatically receive new computing services, removing IT as a bottleneck and placing them as a business enabler for the first time in decades it seems.  The operational savings of delivering a machine in a matter of minutes or hours, versus days or weeks, is an incredible incentive for many organizations. Last year, VMware’s own IT managed to save 90% of the time for provisioning and 30% of the costs by building out a self-service cloud.

That said, responsible companies still seek to do due diligence and build a business case to justify this type of transformation. Looking for areas that will provide the biggest benefit, and prevent any hidden costs in deploying a private cloud, is a healthy exercise to guide your investments in cloud computing. Continue reading →

5 Ways to Avoid Hidden Costs in Building a Private Cloud

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For many, the journey to the cloud has been expensive, particularly if they are investing in their own internal private cloud. The benefits are clear, the Aberdeen Group showed in 2011 that companies would save a total of 12% per application by hosting it in house versus a public cloud. Still, too many companies have found themselves in the unfortunate position of either spending more than they originally planned, or struggling to make sure costs don’t get out of hand.

These are not companies that are novice to IT, they are sophisticated IT organizations—organizations that ask tough questions and put detailed plans in place. One example, that I know of first hand, was an international bank that spent millions of dollars and six months of professional services time before scrapping their existing cloud project and restarting it with a completely new approach and toolset.

These organizations are being stymied by hidden costs that they did not anticipate. For these companies, the big challenge is making their private cloud fit their IT Infrastructure puzzle. It is possible to keep these investments on track and reap the benefits of cloud computing with decreased costs, faster provisioning times, and improved time to market for your services. The secret is to be aware of areas for hidden costs. I first explored these in my Cloud Expo article: Avoiding the Hidden Costs that Derail Cloud Projects. Continue reading →

Application Director Video Series: Scale-out & Update for a Clustered Application

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In part I of this series, we created a vFabric Application Director blueprint and deployment profile for a corporate network and deployed it with an execution plan. Then, we showed how simple it is to redeploy on Amazon EC2.

In part II of this series, we took the same application, and swapped out one of the application components, specifically we changed the data store to vPostgres on an external node, and updated the application running in production.

In this post, we will pick up with the now vPostgres-driven app and see how we can perform a scale out and an update to the application itself that will include adding 3 nodes to the app cluster and updating the WAR file. Continue reading →

How VMware IT Is Going To Save Up To $6MM In IT Costs This Year With SDDC Transformation

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Running a software company requires a hefty IT budget, especially when you are company the size of VMware. IT Development and R&D teams need several environments to produce quality software—from sandboxes, collaborative development environments, functional test, performance test, and of course production environments. These environments are required for each feature and product developed. In addition, sales and marketing teams need websites, demo environments, sales and marketing automation solutions, etc. Then layer on all the backend systems like analytics, Finance, and HR systems—you end up with server sprawl. VMware is not immune to this type of challenge. But, we do have a plan to cut costs by $5-6 million this year through something called policy based provisioning and management. In this article, we will cover:

  1. What is policy-based provisioning management?
    1. Provisioning resources by cost
    2. Provisioning as a lease model
    3. Provisioning with built-in monitoring and analytics
  2. Building policy management into the datacenter
  3. How provisioning and de-provisioning work Continue reading →

Accelerate and Automate Provisioning and Management of Zend Server with VMware vFabric Application Director

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My good friend Al Pacino once said, “never ‘name drop’ in showbiz.” (joke)

But, this is software.

Zend is where developers go for PHP expertise and technologies. Their customers are the who’s who of software—Toyota, GoDaddy, Yale, Samsung, NYSE, iStockphoto, AOL, TribalDDB, Disney Travel, Virgin Mobile, Skype, Electronic Arts and more. Zend’s case studies are great too, and next month Zend is teaming with VMware to help customers automate and manage Zend deployments on VMware infrastructure.

On March 12, 2013 at 9AM PDT, Zend is delivering a webinar with VMware’s vFabric Application Director Team titled, “Accelerate and Automate Provisioning and Management of Zend Server with VMware vFabric Application Director”. More about the webinar is below. Continue reading →

Application Director Video Series (2): Re-Deploying an App with a Different Database

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In this vFabric Application Director video series, we are using a simple application to demonstrate the power of automated provisioning in the cloud. In the first video, Cloud Bursting: How to Auto-Deploy Apps Internally AND on Amazon EC2, we showed how simple it is to first deploy an app to an internal cloud, then how within a matter of minutes you can redeploy the same app to a public cloud using Amazon EC2 as an example. This works because Application Director standardizes applications into blueprints, making them portable across cloud environments.

In this post and the video below, we are going show you that not only does Application Director make it simple to move your app across clouds, but it also helps make your application more modular, allowing for you to swap out application components such as your database. In the example below, we will take the previous application blueprint and perform an iteration on it. By simply changing it’s Spring profile we will be able to swap the in-memory database the application had been using to point to vPostgres on an external node, and deploy it. Continue reading →

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