managing private CA Technologies solutions

cloud services

with Cisco UCS

and CA solutions

Peter Waterhouse

we

can

private cloud

services with

Cisco UCS and

CA Technologies

solutions

Peter Waterhouse

STRATEGIC ALLIANCES

table of contents

executive summary

Challenge 04

Managing the Private Cloud

Section 2:

Opportunity: Unified Computing and

Unified Management 05

Cisco Unified Computing System Extended Management: CA Tecnologies and Cisco UCS Manager Integration Discovery, Service Modeling, and Root-Cause Analysis

Performance Management and Analytics Advanced Automation

Section 3:

Benefits 10

Comprehensive UCS Management Capabilities

SECTION 4

Conclusions 11

SECTION 5

Challenge

Increased agility and massive cost efficiencies from scalable, elastic IT delivered as services across the Internet are fast becoming the new normal and the basis of business computing. Traditional architectures, platforms, and IT management methods have yet to thrive in the new age of cloud computing and will fall short. Furthermore, as organizations begin to deploy massively virtualized private cloud platforms, managing technology from a silo-based perspective, with manual processes and reactive monitoring, will limit financial gains and business potential.

Opportunity

In private cloud computing, everyone is a service provider and everything is delivered as a service. When cloud providers separate services from the underlying infrastructure, opportunities for IT

organizations to track and measure their own effectiveness abound. This, however, requires a base set of components: first, a platform to unify disparate elements (system, networks and storage); and second, software solutions that manage the services delivered from the private cloud. Software solutions to manage cloud service performance—combined with virtualization management and automation—is key to increasing business agility and lowering operational costs.

Benefits

By combining CA Service Assurance, CA Business-Driven Assurance, and Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) Manager, organizations can realize the following benefits:

• Increase staff effectiveness by quickly identifying the root-cause problems of system and network performance

• Help prevent business disruption by analyzing KPIs in real time and alerting IT operations before services are adversely affected

• Increase business responsiveness by automating the provisioning process across both physical and virtual infrastructures

• Lower operational costs and reduce risk by detecting configuration changes and drifts against business-state baselines

Section 1: Challenge

Managing the Private Cloud

The allure of self-service, elastic IT resources with pay-as-you-go pricing is causing many organizations to embrace cloud computing architectures in a big way. And while public clouds are still maturing and evolving, the notion of building and deploying private clouds—where the infrastructure is wholly owned by a single organization and housed within the enterprise firewall—is quickly gaining traction. According to Tom Bittman of Gartner Research, “Cloud computing has a promising future, but many large enterprises will invest in the near-term on private cloud-computing services, especially in the area of infrastructure as a service.”1

While private cloud computing undoubtedly holds great promise, its inherent characteristics will require far more flexibility from both the hardware platforms and the IT management tools that support them. Example characteristics and management requirements include:

• Service-based and self-service: In cloud computing, everything IT delivers should be regarded as a

service. Since users and customers need to subscribe to these services, the cloud model dictates that services should be presented and accessed in a simple way. This requires IT management solutions that enable organizations to operate as true service providers, providing a catalog of service options and prices, together with presenting charges and bills.

• Virtualized and automated: In the cloud, delivery of services and ongoing usage tracking and

measurement should be completely automated. IT management and processes should be completely hidden from the user and require no manual intervention whatsoever. Additionally, since private clouds operate on pools of virtualized resources, the ability to build elasticity requires the ability to scale resources up and down according to fluctuating conditions.

• Assurance and service quality: At an operational level, processes need to be in place to ensure service

delivery is in accordance with business-based contracts and service level agreements. Since private cloud services can be accessed by customers and business partners (e.g. SaaS), capabilities need to address operational performance and the quality of service perceived by business users and customers. • Comprehensive security: As cloud computing deployment gains traction, so will the requirement to

ensure data privacy, support complex trust models, and access controls. Since cloud security is till the primary concern for organizations, incorporating robust yet flexible policy-based controls across an extended and dynamic service-supply chain will be critical to success.

While each of these requirements is equally important, the building blocks to successful cloud computing is a flexible unified platform, backed by business-driven automation and service assurance.

CA Business-Driven Automation and Service Assurance for Cisco Unified Computing System builds on the Cisco Unified Computing System Manager to manage cloud services deployed across both Cisco and legacy infrastructure. By working collaboratively, Cisco and CA have developed a solution that combines physical and virtual computing with service assurance and automation. The result is a highly-scalable and dynamic system—one in which virtualized hardware is provisioned according to business demands and workloads, and cloud services are monitored in real time to ensure optimum performance.

Section 2: Opportunity

Unified Computing and Unified Management

Cisco Unified Computing System

The Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) represents a radical simplification of traditional architectures, dramatically reducing the number of devices that must be purchased, cabled, configured, powered, cooled, and secured. The solution delivers end-to-end optimization for virtualized environments while retaining the ability to support traditional OS and application stacks in physical environments. Unlike traditional architectures, Cisco UCS is a next generation data center platform that unites computing, networking, storage access, and virtualization into one cohesive system. Components include: • Fabric interconnect and fabric extenders for 10 Gigabit Ethernet and Fiber Channels over Ethernet

with extension capabilities

• Blade servers and chassis for energy efficiency and memory expansion

• Virtual adapters for virtual host bus adapters and network interface controller (NIC) adapters Cisco UCS also contains a management component—Cisco UCS Manager—which is embedded within the fabric interconnect for integrated system-level physical device management. From a management perspective, Cisco UCS Manager acts as a domain level manager for the Cisco UCS platform and devices, using service profiles and templates to provide role- and policy-based management. In addition to participating in the server provisioning, Cisco UCS Manager provides device level discovery, inventory, monitoring, fault detection, and auditing for Cisco UCS devices.

Extended Management: CA and Cisco UCS Manager Integration

While Cisco UCS Manager provides comprehensive device management across the UCS domain,

including blade chassis and servers, its power is amplified when integrated at a cross-domain enterprise level. Cisco and CA have collaborated to deliver a solution that does just that, combining Service Assurance and Business-Driven Automation capabilities. Now organizations have a single solution to handle faults, performance, and configuration management within the UCS virtualized environment and across physical infrastructure. Our solution also addresses the increasing need for automated policy-based provisioning of the physical, virtual, and cloud resources needed to keep IT operations costs down as complexity of delivering cloud services increases.

Three important solutions integrate with Cisco UCS Manager to deliver the capabilities discussed above: 1. CA Spectrum® Infrastructure Manager (Spectrum IM) provides users with performance-driven

root-cause and impact analysis to help ensure the health and reliability of their UCS environment and the applications and cloud services that will be delivered over the UCS-based infrastructure. 2. CA eHealth® Performance Manager (eHealth PM) proactively manages the performance of the UCS

3. CA Spectrum® Automation Manager (Spectrum AM) enables the automation of a broad range

of datacenter operational processes running on the Cisco Unified Computing System platform. Extended capabilities include: configuration management, automated provisioning, policy-based automation, and self-service.

To further extend capabilities across the entire datacenter, the CA Virtual Performance Management solution provides all three products with a common management layer for multi-platform, multi-vendor virtual server technology control.

The integration point between Cisco UCS Manager and CA solutions is provided by CA’s SystemEDGE agent. SystemEDGE is a lightweight data gatherer used across multiple CA products. Furthermore, its lightweight architecture allows custom written modules that plug into the agent itself in order to gather customized data. These modules, one of which has been provided for the Cisco UCS Manager, are called Application Insight Modules (AIMs). When deployed, the Cisco UCS AIM gathers information via the Cisco UCS Manager XML API and allows this information to be queried via standard SNMP. Because of its generic nature, the SNMP queries can come from just about anywhere: CA Spectrum IM, CA Spectrum AM, CA eHealth, or even a third-party tool and utility. The architecture supporting Cisco UCS is shown in Figure 1.

Discovery, Service Modeling, and Root-Cause Analysis

With the integration to the UCS Manager configured and enabled via the SystemEDGE agent, CA Spectrum Infrastructure Management (IM) is able to provide broader and more advanced management of the UCS system. CA Spectrum IM will perform a discovery of the UCS infrastructure and create a software model for components, including the UCS Manager, blade-chassis, blades, and the fabric interconnect switches.

Figure 1

CA and Cisco UCS managemement architecture.

In addition, CA Spectrum IM determines the connectivity and relationships between the UCS components using service models. These models can also be uploaded as configuration items to an external Configuration Management Database (CMDB).

At an infrastructure management level, the UCS service models are represented in CA Spectrum IM’s topology map as a graphical presentation of the UCS infrastructure (see Figure 2 below). The UCS chassis model in CA Spectrum IM’s object database is designed to display the overall health of the UCS chassis and blade servers within it. Each fabric interconnect is also topologically significant: they mark the boundary between a Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) data center network and the conventional IP network and switches between the chassis-based blades. Each blade is not topologically significant but is modeled to represent the BIOS level information available through the UCS. Alternatively, a topologically significant model of the OS or hypervisor software running on a blade can be manually associated with or promoted to the chassis to take on the role of the blade.

The topology maps provide system administrators with a single tool to display information on each UCS system and the services they support. At a chassis level, details such as system, environment, and power are displayed together with detailed information views for each blade.

In addition to the topology view, CA Spectrum IM’s “OneClick” Operations Console includes a hierarchical view of the UCS environment located in the left navigation panel. This expandable view of each UCS Manager, UCS chassis, and associated components with alarm counts enables operators to rapidly pinpoint UCS components under management—with locator searches available to rapidly find all UCS Managers, all chassis, or all fabric interconnects.

Figure 2

CA Spectrum IM topology map with Cisco UCS container.

One of the advantages of using CA Spectrum IM for managing the UCS is the enhanced root-cause analysis and alarm correlation, which can quickly pinpoint root cause and eliminate unnecessary alarms that are symptoms of the root cause. CA developed CA Spectrum IM’s root-cause support of the UCS infrastructure to understand the UCS chassis as a correlation domain that includes all components within each chassis. The enhanced root cause analysis is especially powerful, since it identifies when UCS fabric interconnects and chassis issues are caused by the UCS and when they are not (i.e. outside the UCS platform). When faults occur within the UCS correlation domain, symptomatic alarms are suppressed and a single root-cause alarm is issued, eliminating extraneous “noise.”

For example, if a UCS chassis power subsystem fails, affecting the blades (and services running on them), then individual alarms on all the blades will be suppressed in order to point the fault to the chassis (the root cause). Suppressed alarms are preserved and listed in the alarm details tab as symptoms of the root cause.

Performance Management and Analytics

When integrated with Cisco UCS Manager, CA eHealth Performance Manager (PM) manages UCS system performance by collecting key performance indicators across the Cisco UCS system including blade servers, fabric interconnect switches, fiber channels, and Ethernet interfaces. It also collects key performance indicators of environmental components including power, current, voltage, and temperature. CA eHealth PM then analyzes this data, proactively identifies systemic performance issues, and alerts infrastructure managers before users and services are negatively impacted. The solution also provides insight into historical data via interactive Web-based interfaces—and, in conjunction with out-of-the-box at-a-glance reports, better enables the prioritization of resources based upon the health of infrastructure components.

The ability to detect when performance metrics deviate from a desired state is a key attribute of the solution. For example, if application code is deployed in a UCS environment and introduces a memory leak, CA eHealth PM will detect the memory usage of the blade deviating from normal and will generate an alert to indicate the potential service-impacting issue. The issue can then be rectified before users are negatively impacted.

There are even more benefits when CA Spectrum IM and CA eHealth PM are implemented together. Proactive performance alerts generated in CA eHealth PM are automatically sent to CA Spectrum IM, from which the operator uses an integrated workflow to navigate between the CA Spectrum IM UCS service model (and affected component) and the associated CA eHealth PM UCS performance reports. This integration increases operator productivity and reduces the potential for costly service outages. Advanced Automation

continuous, automated discovery and mapping of applications and system infrastructure elements, resulting in improved accuracy of configurations under management control. Any changes to a Cisco UCS platform and the software stack running on the platform, as compared with a user specified reference configuration, will be detected. It can then be reported for further action via an automated ITIL® process or automatically remediated based on a predetermined policy action. This reference configuration can be either of the following:

• A baseline snapshot used as a gold standard snapshot to detect servers that are out of compliance with specific corporate standards

• A periodic on-demand snapshot of a server’s configuration settings that are compared with prior snapshots from the same server to detect changes that may impact an application’s performance over time With CA Spectrum AM, users can create templates which are associated with a UCS service profile with an application stack. In this way, multiple instances of applications can be more easily created

and deployed without the need for the user to replicate common configuration specifications.

CA Spectrum Automation Manager is also designed to support the automated provisioning of software

stacks (OS and applications) and Cisco UCS platforms, as defined by service profiles, to provide complete cloud services. CA Spectrum Automation Manager supports automated provisioning on both physical and virtual server platforms.

Multiple levels of provisioning are supported to meet a range of technical and business requirements.

• Operator-initiated: Manual provisioning executed by an authorized administrator

• Alert-driven: Provisioning and configuration change requests are routed through change management

systems and executed upon approval

• Scheduled: Resources and services are provisioned at a set date and time

• Dynamic: Resources are provisioned in real time in response to changing business needs and

performance and configuration issues

¬ Further advanced policy-based automation makes it possible for administrators to define policy

rule sets for the Cisco UCS platform after which automated actions will be initiated when the rules are triggered. The rules are developed using the metrics available to CA Spectrum Automation Manager itself, and/or through integration with Cisco UCS Manager and its own metrics. Once a rule triggers, the user-specified action takes place. This action can take many forms, including: • Enabling application services to dynamically scale up and down based on usage/performance criteria • Initiating an application configuration management discovery task and checking the current

configuration against a desired state for compliance

• Running an IT Process Automation Management workflow that executes a predefined coordinated set of cross-domain IT processes (integration and data exchange, end-to-end nested processes, and coordinated on-demand process control)

Finally, with the Spectrum AM solution, Cisco UCS platforms can be made available as a part of an end-user self-service reservation system. This allows users to quickly and securely reserve resources

for application testing, development, training, production and cloud environments without the need to directly involve IT support staff.

Section 3: Benefits

Comprehensive UCS Management Capabilities

In summary, benefits from Service Assurance solutions (CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and eHealth Performance Manager integrated with Cisco UCS Manager) include:

• Immediate insight into the health of the UCS platform by automatically discovering UCS models and populating a topology map and graphical management interface

• Increased staff productivity, generated by providing a single “OneClick” management interface that instantly highlights problem components

• Lower IT management costs for root-cause analysis and alarm correlation that can quickly pinpoint problems and eliminate unnecessary alarms

• Better support for a dynamic cloud environment by continuously analyzing key performance indicators, alerting IT operations before business users are adversely affected

¬ In addition, Business-Driven Automation capabilities (CA Spectrum Automation Manager

integrated with Cisco UCS Manager) include:

• Helping prevent unplanned business disruption and ensuring compliance by detecting configuration changes and drifts against business-state baselines

• Reducing costs by delivering a single integrated solution that manages, configures, and provisions services across both physical and virtual infrastructure

• Providing better control and agility by allowing users to self-select only the services they need • Streamlining and automating the process of provisioning an end-to-end service across the entire

technology stack

• Integrating policy-based control and Cisco UCS Manager Profiles to dynamically allocate resources based on changing business conditions

Section 4: Conclusions

Increased business agility and massive cost efficiencies gained from scalable, elastic-IT delivered as services across the Internet is fast becoming the new normal and the basis of business computing. Yet to thrive in the era of cloud computing, traditional architectures, platforms and IT management methods will fall short.

Private cloud service delivery requires advanced hardware and IT management capabilities: first, a platform to unify disparate elements (system, networks, and storage); and second, software solutions that support the building and management of cloud services themselves. In this context, a critical foundation that supports the principles of cloud computing—providing self-service, virtualization management, and automation—is especially important.

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the potential to make a positive difference for any organization, including: cloud computing, service management, IT financial management, and, of course, best practices.