Cloud Management Platform Overview First Published On: 06-09-2016 Last Updated On: 07-25-2017 1
Table of Contents 1. Cloud Management Platform Overview 1.1.Cloud Consumer Request/Catalog 1.2.Cloud Admin 1.3.Infrastructure and Ops Admin 1.4.IT Release Automation 2
1. Cloud Management Platform Overview vrealize cloud management platform delivers the management capabilities that allow you to effectively manage the complete lifecycle of services delivered in a hybrid IT environment. 3
1.1 Cloud Consumer Request/Catalog Welcome to the Cloud Consumer Catalog walkthrough. Click the arrow keys to navigate through the walkthrough. Welcome to the Cloud Management Platform Overview demo. In this demo we will highlight the features of VMware's vrealize Suite - end to end. The demo can be run in order, or by specific sections which are listed on the menu on the left edge of the window. First let's start with an end user named Joe who will log in to deploy an application that he needs to do his job functions. [Click 'Sign In'] 4
We are now logged in as Joe and are looking at the portlets on the home screen. These portlets can be customized to meet the specific users requirements. Next we will go to the catalog to request an application. [Click the Catalog tab] Each service catalog item can be customized for each user using entitlements. Entitlements allow admins to create a set of policies that determine which services any given consumer can deploy and how they can lifecycle manage their services post-provisioning. We would like to request the 'Simple 2 Tier Wordpress' application. This application has been fully configured and setup by the administrator using the converged blueprint designer. A Converged Blueprint is a unified graphical canvas for designing machines, software components and application stacks with an underlying single unified model for both machine and applications for Private and Public Cloud. [Click Request on 'Simple 2 Tier Wordpress'] 5
This application is made up of two servers, a Web server, and a database server. The application services that will be deployed on each server are listed as well. These components were defined by the administrator when the converged blueprint was created. Click on Update to view the daily costs for this application. Costs are defined by the Cloud administrator and provided by vrealize Business for Cloud, giving the user a clear view on how much each service costs. [Click Update] To see more detailed costing for this application click on the 'View Cost Details' [Click 'View Cost Details'] 6
This data is based on pre-defined cost parameters by your Cloud Administrator and it was defined using vrealize Business for Cloud. [Click Close] Let's request the application [Click Submit] 7
As we click Submit, the request goes and checks the reservations that are established inside vrealize Automation. Reservations are a way for Cloud Administrators to provide a subset of resources to the users within the organization. Once the reservation has been verified, we check for any approvals that might exist, if any approvals are present the process will pause and wait until the approver (defined by the Cloud Administrator) approves the request before it gets executed. If no approvals are present the process will begin deploying the infrastructure as well as any applications that where requested, in this case a two tier WordPress application. [Click OK] We can track our request and see the status of the provisioning by clicking the Requests menu. [Click the Requests tab] 8
We can see the request in progress, on the first line in the list. While we wait, lets logout and log in as Jason who is our Cloud Administrator, so we can have a more in-depth look of our CMP environment. [Click Logout] [Click 'Go back to login page'] 1.2 Cloud Admin 9
Welcome to the Cloud Admin walkthrough. Click the arrow keys to navigate through the walkthrough. Now let's login as Jason the cloud admin, who responsible for defining the service offerings and managing the quality of service. 10
First note that because we are logged in as Jason, a Cloud Administrator, we can see and access a lot more menu tabs. [Click the Requests tab]. Current and previous requests are listed. The request we just submitted is first in the list. [Click the Catalog tab] 11
As an administrator, we see a catalog with more services and items than our typical user Joe would see. [Scroll down to see the full list] Next let's look at some of the costing information in our environment.[click the 'Business Management' tab] Here we can see current costing information for our Private cloud, Public cloud, and vcloud Air. This Data has been discovered and gathered by vrealize Business for Cloud. The costing can be defined by a Cloud Administrator (Jason in this case) or by default we leveraged the out of the box costing reference database that's included. Let's start by looking at our Private cloud costing information. [Click 'Private Cloud (vsphere)'] 12
[Click 'Expenses (vsphere)'] This shows projected monthly costs for our vsphere environment. Scroll down to see all the cost drivers associated with this vsphere environment. [Click 'Operation Analysis (vsphere)'] 13
Navigating to the Operational Analysis for vsphere we see additional information on the different resource components. Operational Analysis displays the cost breakdown information in terms of the current month cost, trend, and total percentage value of CPU, RAM, storage, operating system (license and labor) consumption in your cloud environment. [Click 'Business Management'] [Click 'Showback'] 14
[Click 'Showback Statement'] Now we are looking at a detailed showback statement. We see the Monthly budget, the Month to Date Charge, and the Projected Monthly Charge. All of these are based on the specific business units. Business Units Monthly budgets can be setup to be reflected here. [Click the scroll bar down] 15
Notice the Daily cost savings associated with Idle VMs and the Powered Off VMs. This is very valuable information as it indicates the costs that can be saved by reclaiming the unused resources / capacity. [Click 'Business Management'] [Click 'Cloud Comparison'] 16
[Click 'Compare new VMs to Cloud'] By comparing costs across different clouds, we can make decisions about where to deploy workloads. Here we will edit the sample group of VMs to reflect a hypothetical set of 50 VMs that we may want to deploy. [Click the down arrow by 'My Sample Group'] 17
We will increase the amount of VM's in the sample group to 50 VMs to perform the cloud cost comparison. The Comparison shown here is between Private Cloud, Windows Azure and vcloud Air. We can change which providers are displayed, for example to show AWS. [Click 'Manage Cloud Providers'] 18
We will add Amazon to the comparison. [Click 'Amazon' to simulate dragging] [Click Done] 19
Now we can compare costs including the AWS public cloud costs. This concludes the section on Business Management. Next let's return to the request which Joe had submitted. [Click the Requests tab] The application request has completed successfully. Let's go back and log in as Joe to see the application. [Click Logout] 20
[Click 'Go back to login page'] 1.3 Infrastructure and Ops Admin Welcome to the Infrastructure and Ops Admin walkthrough. Click the arrow keys to navigate through the walkthrough. 21
Here we are logged in as Brian, an Infrastructure and Operation Administrator. On this screen we can see a quick snapshot of the entire SDDC, and quickly determine where we need to go to trouble shoot and optimize the environment. Let's specifically look at the application / workloads that Joe (the end user) had just requested. [Click the 'vr Automation Tenant Overview' tab] Notice that we have 3 Tenants in our environment. We want to look at the vsphere.local tenant. [In the Tenant List, click 'vsphere.local'] 22
The different widgets on the screen update to reflect information relevant to the tenant selected. We want to look at object relationships in the Environment Overview widget first. [Click the scroll bar down] Take a look at the 2 new VM's created by the application that Joe had provisioned. [Hover on the last two green Virtual Machines]. This gives a quick snapshot of the overall health of these machines. Let's show how we can resolve problems using Actionable alerts. [To continue, click 'Virtual machine has continuous high memory usage causing stress'] 23
The alert has triggered on two machines. We can check the details of the alerts. [Click 'View Details' for the first virtual machine'] We see the full details of this machine, and the recommendation by the Operations solution to add more memory and resolve the issue. We can click the button to perform the recommended action. [Click 'Set Memory for VM'] 24
We can modify the recommendation if needed, and change memory to 2048 (2GB of RAM) [Click '2276' under the New (MB) column, and hit any key to type in the new value] Since this OS does not support hot-add of hardware, we will have to power cycle it. [Click the checkbox for 'Power Off Allowed'] 25
[Click 'Begin Action'] Every action is tracked and has an associated Task ID. These tasks can be viewed in the Recent Tasks section of the UI. [Click OK] 26
We have now completed the Guided Remediation using this Actionable Alert. [Click the 'Home' button in the upper left of the window] Next let's look at the Cloud Infrastructure monitoring dashboard. [Click 'vr Automation Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring' tab] 27
Let s scroll down to continue. [Click the scroll bar down] Everything so far looks healthy - Green. [Click the scroll bar down] 28
Now we see some degraded health on 2 Hosts, and 1 cluster. When we hover on each, notice the drop in the health score. [Hover on the three red icons, then click the Cluster Compute Resource] Now we are looking directly at the 'Cluster Site A' cluster object, and we have many menu tabs to troubleshoot deeper. [Click the Analysis tab] 29
CPU and Memory workload is high. CPU currently has the highest workload as indicated next to the workload badge. Next let's check capacity. [Click 'Capacity Remaining'] This cluster has been out of capacity for some time (capacity remaining trend graph on top right), and that it's most constrained by Disk, Memory, and CPU. Let's look at some additional details. [Click the scroll bar down] 30
[Click the sideways scroll bar] Notice the very high 'Peak Values' for the different capacity containers, and that the Remaining capacity is 0% in this cluster. At this point we would typically check 'Reclaimable Capacity' to see if there are any possibilities to reclaim any capacity. But we know this has been ongoing and so instead we will check capacity simulations to add capacity, and know how much we need in the future. [Click the Projects tab] 31
There is capacity shortfall now and going well into the future. We had previously created a Capacity simulation Project to add more hardware. Let's visualize the impact of this project by moving it up and adding it to the above chart. [Click the green + on the second project] The Project has multiple scenarios 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3. 1.1 adds some hosts, but clearly not enough as the red does not go away. Then when scenarios 1.2 and 1.3 implementation date hits, all the red disappears and there is plenty of free capacity for the future. This helps determine how much capacity we need to add to this cluster. Let's do some troubleshooting using the unstructured data that is collected using the Log Analytics solution. We can easily launch in context to the log analytics solutions using the actions menu. [Click the Actions menu] 32
[Click 'Search for logs in vrealize Log Insight'] Here we are still logged in as Brian. We are now looking at log messages for this cluster 'Cluster Site A' and we can leverage the power of the built in dashboards to troubleshoot and gain visibility into the unstructured data. [Click Dashboards] 33
It's defaulting to a general overview dashboard, and we can see a lot of general information as a result of the collected logs. [Click General] [Click 'VMware - vra 7.0 BETA'] 34
We currently see the latest 5 minutes of data, but we can look at a larger data sample for this automation and orchestration environment. [Click 'Latest 5 minutes of data] [Latest click 24 hours of data'] 35
We see a quick overview of the events that have taken place. We can scroll down to look at the other widgets in this dashboard. Next we will look at current problems in the environment. [Click 'General - Problems'] There have been no problems / errors in the last 24 hours in the automation and orchestration environment. [Click 'vra - App Authoring'] 36
We see that different IaaS workflows have started and completed. Next we will look at the Content Pack Marketplace. [Hover on the first bar in the left graph, then click the menu icon in the upper right] [Click 'Content Packs'] 37
Log Insight Content Packs enable us to bring the power of Log Insight to analyze other systems (storage, application, network, OS's.) We can scroll down to view the many solutions available. As organizations mature and move towards Application Release Automation they want to be able to leverage all these tools together. Next let's see how Shauna who is a Dev Ops IT Manager can achieve this using these integrated solutions. [Click the scroll bar to view marketplace, then click the 'vrealize Automation' browser tab] 1.4 IT Release Automation 38
Welcome to the IT Release Automation walkthrough. Click the arrow keys to navigate through the walkthrough. We are logged in as Shauna, Dev Ops IT Administrator. We have an application that we want to move to the staging environment for further testing. [Click the Catalog tab] [Click the scroll bar down] 39
The application / blueprint that we want to move for further testing is called 'Single Package Request'. [Click Request on 'Single Package Request'] Leveraging the power of vrealize Code Stream Management for IT Dev Ops we can now migrate any construct of an application BluePrint across the Automation solution tenants. This is truly a about being able to manage and deploy application constructs between vrealize Automation tenants and or environments. [Click Next] 40
In the 'Choose Actions' menu we can choose what we want to capture from a pre-defined environment (endpoint) to be migrated between Automation environments / tenants. A pre-defined environment, in this context, is one or more systems that we can retrieve several components such as infrastructure and application constructs. [Click 'Capture content from endpoint'] We will select this box to deploy and/or test the capture of this application / blueprint. This instructs the automation system to Deploy and or Test the construct that we just captured in the target system. [Click 'Deploy to test and/or run unit tests'] 41
At this time we are not interested in releasing it to production yet - which is why we are currently testing. When we are ready to do so the option to release to production is available. [Click Next] We have a number of constructs that we can migrate. These constructs range from blueprints to software components to operational dashboards. Blueprints, Operational Dashboards and others are considered package types. [Click 'Select package type'] 42
[ Click 'Automation/CompositeBlueprint'] We will choose the source endpoint(s) that are configured in the environment. A pre-defined endpoint, in this context, is one or more systems that we can retrieve several components such as infrastructure and application constructs. [Click 'Select source endpoint' then click 'vra Test'] 43
Once the endpoint is selected a dynamic list of content packages will be available for selection. These content packages are blueprints (packaged applications) that we want to migrate from one environment to another. [Click 'Select content package' then click 'Simple 2 Tier Wordpress...'] By selecting the 'include dependencies' checkbox, we will ensure that all the associated blueprint / application components will also be migrated over to the target tenant. [Click 'Include dependencies'] 44
[Click Next] By selecting the pre-defined endpoint, this determines the target where the deploy/test of the blueprint/application will take place. [Click 'Rainpole stage vra'] 45
By checking the 'Run unit tests' checkbox, the blueprint / application will have a number of unit test run against it. Unit Tests are validation tests for Blueprints / Application constructs. In this case we do NOT want to perform the unit tests. [Click 'Run unit tests' to uncheck it] [Click Next] 46
[Click Submit] The request has been submitted. [Click OK] 47
Next we will look at the status of our request. [Click the Requests tab] We can see that the request is 'In Progress', but let's go see what's happening behind the scenes. [Click the 'Code Stream' tab] 48
VMware vrealize Code Stream provides release automation and continuous delivery to enable frequent, reliable software releases while reducing operational risks. Navigate to the 'Pipeline Executions' tab to see further details of the request. [Click the 'Pipeline Executions' tab] Code Stream s Pipeline Automation orchestrates the end-to-end software delivery process across various groups responsible for building, testing, and deploying a new release. Expand the pipeline that is in progress. [Click the arrow to expand the first item] 49
Note all of the different stages of this pipeline. Leveraging the power of vrealize Code Stream we are able to manage each task through each phase of the pipeline execution. The Green indicates that each phase is completed successfully. [Click the refresh icon in the lower left] The Pipeline Execution is now complete. There are 4 phases to the pipeline execution process, Capture, Test, Release, and Finalize. Notice how we have bypassed the release stage tasks, and this has been finalized to our staging environment. [Click the Requests tab] 50
We see that the full request process is now Successful. Let's verify that this Single Package Request was in fact released to our staging environment. [Click Logout] Open a new browser tab to log in to the staging tenant [Click the + to open a new browser tab] 51
Rainpole-Stage is the staging tenant that we deployed the blueprint to. [Click 'Rainpole-Stage'] Log in as the Cloud Administrator Jason. 52
[Click the Design tab] Here is the Simple 2 Tier Wordpress blueprint that we moved to this staging tenant for further testing. [Click 'Simple 2 Tier Wordpress'] 53
Blueprints are built on a dynamic drag-n-drop design canvas, allowing admins to choose any supported components, drag them on to the canvas, build dependencies, and publish the finished product to the catalog. The supported components include machine shells for all the supported OOTB platforms, software components, endpoint networks, NSX-provided networks, XaaS components, and even other blueprints that have already been published. Notice that all the Blueprint and it's components such as software constructs are now available in this new tenant. [Click Cancel] [Click 'Software Components'] 54
The different software components here are part of the blueprint. Anyone with entitlements to this blueprint will have access to it in their self service catalog. This concludes the demo of VMware's Cloud Management Platform brought to you by the power of the VMware vrealize Suite. 55