Foundations and Concepts vRealize Automation 7.
Foundations and Concepts You can find the most up-to-date technical documentation on the VMware website at: https://docs.vmware.com/ If you have comments about this documentation, submit your feedback to docfeedback@vmware.com VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Ave. Palo Alto, CA 94304 www.vmware.com Copyright © 2008–2018 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. Copyright and trademark information. VMware, Inc.
Contents Foundations and Concepts Using Scenarios 5 6 Using the Goal Navigator 6 Introducing vRealize Automation 6 Providing On-Demand Services to Users Overview vRealize Business Standard Edition Overview Tenancy and User Roles Tenancy Overview 11 16 21 Requesting and Managing Items in the Catalog Creating and Publishing Catalog Items Services for the Service Catalog Catalog Items Actions 10 11 User Roles Overview Service Catalog 21 22 22 23 23 Entitlements 23 Approval Policies 24 In
Foundations and Concepts Common Components Notifications Branding 34 34 35 Life Cycle Extensibility 36 vRealize Automation Extensibility Options 36 Leveraging Existing and Future Infrastructure Configuring Business-Relevant Services 36 37 Extending vRealize Automation with Event-Based Workflows Integrating with Third-Party Management Systems 37 Adding New IT Services and Creating New Actions 37 37 Calling vRealize Automation Services from External Applications Distributed Execution VMware,
Foundations and Concepts VMware vRealize ™ Automation provides a secure portal where authorized administrators, developers, or business users can request new IT services. In addition, they can manage specific cloud and IT resources that enable IT organizations to deliver services that can be configured to their lines of business in a self-service catalog. This documentation describes the features and capabilities of vRealize Automation.
Foundations and Concepts Using Scenarios You can use scenarios to build working samples of vRealize Automation functionality that you can learn from or customize to suit your needs. Scenarios walk you through the most common and simplified workflow to complete a vRealize Automation task. They do not contain options or choices, and serve as introductory examples to both basic and advanced vRealize Automation functionality.
Foundations and Concepts vRealize Automation provides a secure portal where authorized administrators, developers or business users can request new IT services and manage specific cloud and IT resources, while ensuring compliance with business policies. Requests for IT service, including infrastructure, applications, desktops, and many others, are processed through a common service catalog to provide a consistent user experience.
Foundations and Concepts n Infrastructure as a Service Overview With Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), you can rapidly model and provision servers and desktops across virtual and physical, private and public, or hybrid cloud infrastructures. n Software Components Overview Software automates the installation, configuration, and life cycle management of middleware and application deployment components such as Oracle, MySQL, WAR, and DB Schemas.
Foundations and Concepts n Service Catalog Overview The service catalog provides a unified self-service portal for consuming IT services. Users can browse the catalog to request items they need, track their requests, and manage their provisioned items. Infrastructure as a Service Overview With Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), you can rapidly model and provision servers and desktops across virtual and physical, private and public, or hybrid cloud infrastructures.
Foundations and Concepts XaaS Overview With the XaaS, XaaS architects can create XaaS blueprints and resource action, and publish them as catalog items. With XaaS, you can provide anything as a service using the capabilities of VMware vRealize ™ Orchestrator ™. For example, you can create a blueprint that allows a user to request a backup of a database. After completing and submitting a backup request, the user receives a backup file of the database they specified.
Foundations and Concepts n Promotes efficiencies in the virtual infrastructure by making it possible to compare the costs, efficiency, and availability of their private cloud with public cloud providers and industry benchmark data. n Optimizes decisions about placement for virtual workloads and tradeoffs between buying new hardware and using public cloud providers. For more information about vRealize Business Standard Edition, see the vRealize Business Standard Edition documentation set.
Foundations and Concepts Table 1. Tenant Configuration (Continued) Configuration Area Description Service catalog offerings Service architects can create and publish catalog items to the service catalog and assign them to service categories. Services and catalog items are always specific to a tenant. Infrastructure resources The underlying infrastructure fabric resources, for example, vCenter servers, Amazon AWS accounts, or Cisco UCS pools, are shared among all tenants.
Foundations and Concepts Infrastructure configuration, including the infrastructure sources that are available for provisioning, can be configured in any tenant and is shared among all tenants. You divide your infrastructure resources, such as cloud or virtual compute resources, into fabric groups and assign an administrator to manage those resources as the fabric administrator. Fabric administrators can allocate resources in their fabric group to business groups by creating reservations.
Foundations and Concepts Multitenant Deployment In a multitenant environment, the system administrator creates tenants for each organization that uses the same vRealize Automation instance. Tenant users log in to the vRealize Automation console at a URL specific to their tenant. Tenant-level configuration is segregated from other tenants and from the default tenant. Users with system-wide roles can view and manage configuration across multiple tenants.
Foundations and Concepts Figure 2. Multitenant Example with Infrastructure Configuration Only in Default Tenant http://vra.mycompany.com/ vcac/org/tenanta/ http://vra.mycompany.com/ vcac/org/tenantb/ http://vra.mycompany.
Foundations and Concepts Figure 3. Multitenant Example with Infrastructure Configuration in Each Tenant http://vra.mycompany.com/ vcac/org/tenanta/ http://vra.mycompany.com/ vcac/org/tenantb/ http://vra.mycompany.com/ vcac/org/tenantc/ Tenant A Tenant B Tenant C Tenant admin http://vra. mycompany.
Foundations and Concepts IaaS Administrator IaaS administrators manage cloud, virtual, networking, and storage infrastructure at the system level, creating and managing endpoints and credentials, and monitoring IaaS logs. IaaS administrators organize infrastructure into tenant-level fabric groups, appointing the fabric administrators who are responsible for allocating resources within each tenant through reservations and reservation, storage, and networking policies.
Foundations and Concepts Table 4. Tenant Role Overview Role Description Tenant Administrator Typically a line-of-business administrator, business manager, or IT administrator who is responsible for a tenant. Tenant administrators configure vRealize Automation for the needs of their organizations. They are responsible for user and group management, tenant branding and notifications, and business policies such as approvals and entitlements.
Foundations and Concepts Table 4. Tenant Role Overview (Continued) Role Description Blueprint Architects Umbrella term for the individuals who are responsible for creating blueprint components and assembling the blueprints that define catalog items for consumers to request from the service catalog. These roles are typically assigned to individuals in the IT department, such as architects or analysts.
Foundations and Concepts Table 5. Tenant Roles and Responsibilities Role Responsibilities Tenant administrator n Customize tenant branding. n Manage tenant identity stores. n Manage user and group roles. n Create custom groups. n Manage notification providers. n Enable notification scenarios for tenant users. n Configure vRealize Orchestrator servers, plug-ins and workflows for XaaS. n Create and manage catalog services. n Manage catalog items. n Manage actions.
Foundations and Concepts Table 5. Tenant Roles and Responsibilities (Continued) Role Responsibilities Software Architect n Create and manage software blueprint components. n Assemble and manage composite blueprints. n Create and manage catalog services. Catalog Administrator How Assigned Tenant administrators can assign this role to users in their tenant at any time from the Administration tab.
Foundations and Concepts The following example is of a typical life cycle. Connie, the consumer of IT services, logs in to the vRealize Automation console. On the Catalog tab, she browses for the service offerings she needs to do her job. The items that are available in the catalog are grouped into service categories, which helps her find what she is looking for. After Connie selects a catalog item, she can view its details to confirm that it is what she wants before submitting a request.
Foundations and Concepts A tenant administrator or catalog administrator can specify information about the service such as the service hours, support team, and change window. Although the catalog does not enforce service-level agreements on services, this information is available to business users browsing the service catalog. Catalog Items Users can browse the service catalog for catalog items that they are entitled to request.
Foundations and Concepts You can entitle an entire service category, which entitles all of the catalog items in that service, including items that are added to the service after you create the entitlement. You can also add individual catalog items in a service to an entitlement. Services do not contain actions. You must add actions to an entitlement individually. For each service, catalog item, or action that you entitle, you can optionally specify an approval policy to apply to requests for that item.
Foundations and Concepts Configuring Infrastructure Fabric The IaaS administrator and fabric administrator roles are responsible for configuring the fabric to enable provisioning of infrastructure services. Fabric configuration is system-wide and is shared across all tenants.
Foundations and Concepts Table 6.
Foundations and Concepts Table 8. Data Collection Types Data Collection Type Description Infrastructure Source Endpoint Data Collection Updates information about virtualization hosts, templates, and ISO images for virtualization environments. Updates virtual datacenters and templates for vCloud Director. Updates regions and machines provisioned on them for Amazon.
Foundations and Concepts To request catalog items, a user must belong to the business group that is entitled to request the item. A business group can have access to catalog items specific to that group and to catalog items that are shared between business groups in the same tenant. In IaaS, each business group has one or more reservations that determine on which compute resources the machines that this group requested can be provisioned.
Foundations and Concepts A compute resource can also have multiple reservations for multiple business groups. In the case of virtual reservations, you can reserve more resources across several reservations than are physically present on the compute resource. For example, if a storage path has 100 GB of storage available, a fabric administrator can create one reservation for 50 GB of storage and another reservation using the same path for 60 GB of storage.
Foundations and Concepts An example of a standalone virtual machine blueprint might be one that specifies a Windows 7 developer workstation with one CPU, 2GB of memory, and a 30GB hard disk. A standalone cloud machine blueprint might specify a Red Hat Linux web server image in a small instance type with one CPU, 2GB of memory, and 160GB of storage.
Foundations and Concepts You can use the metrics to identify underused machines that might be candidates for reclamation. Select the candidate machines and send a reclamation request to the owners of the machines. The machine owner has a fixed period of time to respond to the request. If the machine is still in use, the owner can stop the reclamation process and continue using the machine.
Foundations and Concepts Creating XaaS Blueprints and Actions By using the XaaS blueprints and resource actions, you define new provisioning, request, or action offerings and publish them to the common catalog as catalog items. You can create XaaS blueprints and actions for either requesting or provisioning. The XaaS blueprints for requesting do not provision items and provide no options for post-provisioning operations.
Foundations and Concepts For example, you might want to create an action so that users can take a snapshot of their Amazon machines.
Foundations and Concepts Table 11. XaaS Object Types and Associated Forms Object Type Default Form Additional Forms Custom resource Resource details form based on the attributes of the vRealize Orchestrator plug-in inventory type (read-only). n None XaaS blueprint Request submission form based on the presentation of the selected workflow. n Catalog item details (read-only) n Submitted request details (read-only) Action submission form based on the presentation of the selected workflow.
Foundations and Concepts Configure an outbound mail server to send notifications. Do you want users to be able to respond to notifications? Yes Configure an inbound mail server to receive notifications. No Enable notifications for any events you want to allow users to receive updates for. Do you want to customize the templates for IaaS notifications? Yes TEMPLATE Edit the configuration files that control IaaS notifications. No Tell your users how to subscribe to the notifications you enabled.
Foundations and Concepts System administrators control the default branding for all tenants. A tenant administrator can change the branding of the portal including the login pages, logo, the background color, and the information in the header and footer. If the branding for a tenant is changed, a tenant administrator can always revert back to the system defaults. Life Cycle Extensibility The architecture of vRealize Automation is designed with extensibility in mind.
Foundations and Concepts Blueprint authors can control many machine options, including provisioning methods, by configuring blueprints for various types of infrastructure. For a full list of supported infrastructure types and provisioning methods, see vRealize Automation Support Matrix. For information about configuring infrastructure blueprints, see Configuring vRealize Automation.
Foundations and Concepts It can also be beneficial to expose entirely new services in the service catalog, so that users can automate other initiatives directly via the portal. Service architects can create XaaS blueprints for storageas-a-service, networking services or virtually any kind of IT service by using XaaS. For details about how to create new catalog items, see Configuring vRealize Automation.
