Posted by Sushant Rao
Sr. Technology Alliance Manager
For years, we’ve been seeing that virtualization has
become a major component of our customers’ datacenters. As a result of
the cost savings and improved management productivity compared to
physical environments, they are standardizing on virtualization as a
better way of computing.
For most companies, their end-to-end management processes cut
across several technology domains and tools. Therefore, virtual
infrastructure needs to integrate with other management tools to
deliver virtualization-smart management that takes advantage of the
benefits of VMware virtualization.
One customer brought up provisioning as an example. When a
user wants to get an application deployed, they open a ticket with the
service desk. After the request has been approved, there is an
automation process. This process will provision a host, storage and
the network if the current virtualized infrastructure doesn’t have
enough capacity. At this point, VMware products would come into the
process. Lifecycle Manager is used to provision the VM and then the VM
would be deployed and added to VMware Infrastructure. Then, the
service desk needs to be notified that the request has been completed.
The whole process covers a number of different products and tools
In addition to protecting their investments in existing
management tools, better integration with VMware virtualization means
easier training for their staff and more efficient processes.
So, what is VMware doing?
VMware has had open APIs for integrated management for some
time now, but recently we expanded our investment by creating the
VMware Ready Management Initiative and
defining vCenter Extensibility. vCenter Extensibility provides
structure for these APIs (which interface should be used to do what),
while the VMware Ready Management Initiative defines a qualification
program for integrated solutions with partners (i.e, VMware Ready
Management Solutions) and a roadmap for future management capabilities
(i.e. incorporating B-Hive and other new products).
Taking a look back at the customer’s provisioning example
earlier, how would the VMware Ready Management Initiative make a
difference? Well, with better integration, the systems for service
desk, provisioning of the virtualized infrastructure (if necessary) and
provisioning of the VM will work cooperatively. The whole process can
be automated as approval of the request kicks-off the systems that
provision the host, storage and network, which in turn kick-off
Lifecycle Manager to provision a VM. In addition, once the VM has been
added to VirtualCenter, the service desk will be automatically notified
that the VM has been created.
The main benefit to customers is that they will have a
standardized, automated management process across multiple types of
infrastructure. An ancillary benefit is that companies will have an
easier time selecting partner products for evaluation as well as
deploying these products.
We’ve talked with a number of companies about VMware Ready
Management Solutions. One company in particular, a large, national
healthcare company is looking forward to this initiative because they
feel it will simplify their management processes, reduce the number of
products they needed to evaluate as well as focus their testing on the
functional aspects of the products.
Please follow these links for more information about the VMware
Ready Management Initiative and vCenter and the press release.
