by Rich Bourdeau
Cloud Management Automation – It’s Not Just for New Services
Many people assume that deploying a private or hybrid cloud means a “greenfield project” where you only have to deploy and manage NEW Infrastructure, applications or other IT services. But what about you’re existing installed base of virtual, physical or public cloud resources? A cloud management platform with the right set of capabilities can help you better manage that existing “brownfield environment” of pre-existing machines that you have provisioned over the last number of years.
Why Include Existing Resources into your Cloud?
You may be asking yourself, why should I include my existing applications, machines and other resources in my cloud. Here are the top five use cases why companies are adding existing machines and applications to their cloud environments. Having these resources as part of an on-demand cloud infrastructure allows IT to delegate responsibility to the resource consumers yet maintain control through service entitlement policies which limit the amount and type of resources users can consume as well as the actions they can perform.
- Recycling temporary machines
One of the most common challenges many companies face is so called temporary applications or infrastructure environments staying around long after they are needed. In the past this happened a lot, because it took so long to get new environment in the first place. Users hoarded these resources even when they were not being used, just so they did not have to go through the pain of requesting them again.On-demand private and hybrid clouds help alleviate this problem, because consumers can now get infrastructure or applications in minutes and hours instead of days and weeks. But what about the installed base of all those supposedly temporary resources which have long lived out their useful life. At many companies it is not uncommon for the number of temporary machines to be 10% or more and in DevOps environments this number is likely to be much higher.Many vRealize Automation customers start out by placing a lease on all existing machines. Owners then need to either convert it to a permanent machine or extend the lease for the duration of their project. Resources who’s leases expire can be archived for a specified period just in case they are needed. Resources who’s lease or archived period expire automatically be reclaimed and reused. - Identifying and Reclaiming Inactive and Under Utilized Resources
An application or infrastructure resource is provisioned for what is supposed to be a permanent or very long running task. However, over time it stops being used or maybe its being used, but very infrequently or does not need all the resources that were originally allocated for its use. These are not temporary machines so you cannot associate a lease with them. However ,these systems are consuming resources unnecessarily resulting in inefficient resource utilization and additional hardware purchases.vRealize Automation helps identify potentially inactive resources and automate the process of verifying with the owner that these resources are no longer needed and then reclaiming these resources so that they can be used by others. vRealize Operations also helps identify machines and applications which may be over or under provisioned allowing users to take corrective action with vRealize Automation (see next use case).
- Ongoing Reconfiguration – Scaling Resources in or out
Existing machines or applications may already be provisioned, but how often do changes need to be made to these the machines that support these applications. How often do resources (CPU, memory, storage, networks) need to be added or removed? Do components of an application need to be scaled up or down, to meet changing workload requirements. For example: add additional web servers to this application.Depending on how dynamic your environment is, these ongoing changes can overwhelm your IT staff and manual configuration changes can cause delays that impact your business.vRealize Automation empowers cloud consumers to make their own changes to their environments within the resources dedicated to that group and governance policies established by IT. - Enabling Miscellaneous Day-2 Operations
In addition to reconfiguring resources there are a variety of day-2 operations that resources owners may need to do to keep their systems operating at peak efficiency. These include out of the box capabilities like connecting to the machines, power management, reprovisioning, snapshot management etc. IT Administrators can also add additional command to automate other common management tasks like back/restore leveraging your favorite backup software, installing additional software titles or reactivating a archived VM from lower tier storage.vRealize Automation supports a variety of out of the box, day-2 management tasks. Entitlement policies control what tasks each user is allowed to perform on different types of resources. Tight integration with vRealize Orchestrator and its library of VMware and partner provided workflows and plug-ins enable you to add almost any management task to allow users to better manage their existing systems without having to wait for IT. - Chargeback/Showback
Regardless if you are actually charging your consumers for private or hybrid cloud resources or not, the majority of VMware customers at least want to show the business how much resources they are consuming. For most customers showback is a precursor to implementing chargeback at some point in time. However, how useful is showback or chargeback if it only includes resources that were provisioned since the cloud was deployed and does not include any of the resources that were provisioned for the last x number of years.vRealize Automation allows existing VMs and applications to be imported placed under it’s control. The import process allows these resources to be assigned ownership to business groups and users . This ownership is key to business level reporting. Reports include show back reports that aggregate consumption by individual owner, business group and tenant. Reports also include reclamation savings reports which highlight the efficiency reclamation and reuse of both leased and permanent machines. Finally vRealize Business cost comparisons between on premise private cloud and public cloud allow companies to make strategic decisions about the location of specific applications using cost as one of the factors.
Learn More
To learn more about how VMware SDDC and vRealize Automation can allow your business to accelerate the delivery of IT services while driving down costs, please utilize the following resources:
- See the benefits achieved by other vRealize Automation customers
- Learn using the VCloud Automation 6.x Video Library
- Try HOL-SDC-1421 – Brokering IT Services and Applications with vRealize Automation
Need help deploying your private cloud infrastructure or developing your business justification? Contact us and our experts can help your team build the business case and the solution that will maximize your IT productivity.
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