Ways to Cloud
  1. Cloud Computing - Introduction
  2. Virtualization
  3. Ways to Cloud

 Virtualization journey stages

Virtualization is the stepping stone of cloud computing. Planning technology adoption is essential.

  Exercise

There are 4 stages of adoption, please put them in the right order

 Virtualization stages details

1. Consolidate servers, storage & network assets

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  • Consolidation, systems management, and monitoring.
  • Reduce infrastructure complexity, staffing requirements, and costs.
  • Improve business resilience and utilization.

2. Create logical asset pools

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  • Remove physical resource boundaries.
  • Allocate less than physical boundary.
  • Improve scalability, increase utilization.
  • Reduce hardware costs and simplify deployments.

3. Automate capacity and workload management

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  • Service catalog, metering, and automated deployment of virtualized resources.
  • Integrated virtualization management with IT processes.
  • Reduce overhead, improve productivity.

4. Self Service policy based computing

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  • Centralized, robust, self serve portal for 24X7 access to services.
  • Improve user satisfaction & productivity.
  • Control and manage delivery, support & administrative costs.

 Some challenges

There are some challenges along the journey:
How can I see everything in one place?
Integrated physical/virtual management.
Did someone breach this?
Security.
How many of these do I have?
Images, vm, systems, licenses?
Who is using this and who should be paying for it?
Usage and accounting management.
What is causing the outage?
Integrated monitoring, topology.

 System pools and image managment

System Pools and image management: essential building block for cloud architecture

Apply Best Practices

  • Select Best Practice Patterns based on business needs.
  • Create standardized virtualized building blocks.
  • Select default behaviors.
  • More consistent management.
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Virtual Machine Images

  • Capture and catalog virtual images used in the data center.
  • Standardize virtual image building blocks.
  • Customize virtual environment runtime requirements.
  • Simplified deployment with virtual appliances.
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System Pools

  • Pool standardized virtualized building blocks.
  • Many managed as one.
  • Automatic placement for new workloads.
  • Aggregated monitors and event management.
  • Unified update management profiles for firmware.
  • Durable, Plug-and-play capacity across HW generations.
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Cloud-Ready

  • Workload centric management based on service level goals.
  • Assure SLA achievement.
  • Integrated virtualization management with IT processes.
  • Always available.
  • Elastic scaling.
  • Pay for use.
  • Automated provisioning.
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The scale and flexibility enabled by virtual system pools can provide essential building blocks for a cloud computing architecture.
In most data centers today there is a plethora of systems with varying degrees of standardization and best practices. In order to simplify the management and create a repeatable, predictable infrastructure, you need to create standard building blocks. You can also start this process by applying best practice patterns to the systems that you already have. These patterns define the best practice virtualization configurations depending on the systems and the way you want to use them.
The next step is to capture and catalog the images (operating systems, middleware, and software) used in the datacenter and standardize on those building blocks as well thru virtual appliance definition. This will result in simplified deployments and image management. -- Good image management is key to a successful virtualization environment. Using VMControl Image Management, virtual machine images are stored in an image library and can be captured and cloned. Virtual runtime requirements can be customized for the images, and virtual appliances simply deployed.
The third step involves pooling your standardized virtual configurations into ensembles where you can manage many systems as if they were one. Multiple physical and virtual systems managed as a single entity form a virtual system pool. The manager of the pool automates workload placement and aggregates monitoring and event management from the physical and virtual resources in the pool.
Virtual system pools are ideal building blocks for a cloud computing architecture. Providing flexible and scalable resources in a service management deployment. Pools allow for unique levels of elastic scaling, especially when coupled with the capabilities of scale up servers, such as our IBM Power Systems.
This logically flows into workload management according to the service level agreements defined by the data center. Service Management offerings, such as Tivoli Service Automation Management (TSAM) will help you define and manage those services in tight integration with Systems Director and VMControl.

 Economic Benefits Throughout the Journey

Benefits

Consolidate and Virtualize
  • Higher utilization and avoidance of capital expense.
  • Reduces depreciation expense.
  • Energy and facilities.
Automate and Standardize
  • Time saved deploying new systems.
  • Reduced maintenance through image cloning.
Optimize Cloud Management
  • Self-service provisioning with service catalog.
  • Automated workflows.
Efficient overall systems administration
  • Monitor the virtualized environment.
  • Manage the virtualized environment.
  • Discovery, dependency and change tracking.
Fig. 4.7/1: What is consolidation? Thera are four basic consolidation strategies.
Fig. 4.7/1: What is consolidation? Thera are four basic consolidation strategies.