VMware and Puppet: How to Plan, Deploy & Manage Modern Applications

Editor's Notes

• #6: Here are the key management and automation products in VMware’s SDDC portfolio.
• #7: In 2011 when VMware first embarked on delivering a full set of Cloud Management offerings we described our mission around management as: “simplify and automate IT management”. Our vision was management that was matched to the benefits that virtualization was delivering – benefits anchored on driving down the cost of IT while simultaneously increasing business agility. Far too often, legacy management inhibit these benefits by being overly complex; taking far too long to deliver value; and ultimately being far too expensive.Today our mission remains unchanged – but we’ve broadened it. New capabilities extend management across multiple platforms and providers, and we’re delivering powerful solutions for managing services across hybrid clouds.All to better help you on your journey to the cloud and transition to becoming a broker of IT services.Our differentiated approach to deliver on this vision and to help customers deal with the great scale and dynamic nature of the cloud is to turn management into manageability through intelligent, policy-based automation.
• #8: VMware’s differentiated approach to cloud management translates into three key domains:Cloud Automation – automated, policy-based provisioning and lifecycle management of infra, app and desktop services.Cloud Operations – automated operations of your infrastructure resources.Cloud Business – the ability to meter and manage the cost, quality and value of cloud services.Let’s take a look at what we are delivering in each of these three key areas.
• #9: VMware Cloud Automation provides personalized, self-service delivery of infrastructure, application, and desktop services. By fully automating the end-to-end service lifecycle across heterogeneous and hybrid clouds, VMware CSP allows customers to enable business agility while increasing operational efficiency. In delivering this capability for private and hybrid clouds, we focus on a multi-platform, multi-provider environment to ensure you offer the broadest set of infrastructure capabilities. This is done with vCloud Automation Center’s ability to support multiple infrastructure fabrics across physical, virtual and cloud resources.Application Director enables your end users to model and automate the delivery and lifecycle of an application using a model-based approach to delivering standardized application components. vCAC can also support desktop provisioning in the same way it supports heterogeneous server provisioning. This enables a faster deployment of virtual desktop services to end-users.
• #10: So lets discuss the challenges facing IT – again, the expectations of consumers inside enterprises has changed – and the ability (and opportunity) for these customers to look elsewhere for these IT services is only increasing. Today its Amazon, but just about every major service provider is creating a cloud service targeting enterprise consumers of infrastructure. Bottom line, there is fierce competition.The problem is:Status quo will not cut itCompetitive services are already available and in some cases, viableEnterprise IT (you) are at a disadvantage because your competition (dedicated service providers) are starting from scratch while your reality has significant baggageBUILD OUT THE SLIDE TO SHOW THE CHALLENGES FACING IT AND THE GRAPHIC:The reality or challenges facing IT today include:First - Bringing together all of your existing investments, including:HW and Operating platforms (physical, virtual)A multitude of tools, scripts, processes and pure manual effort that:Receives, translates and routes requestsBuilds, delivers and manages the fabric itselfMonitors performance & capacity of your resourcesAttempts to calculate and show back costsTracks and manages assets and configurationsEtcSecond, There is a high dependency on IT specialists and their knowledge doesn’t scale and these technologies simply do not work together easily…however it is key to point out that, a good portion of these investments work as intended and provide value as a point solution, so the answer is not to just throw them all away and try and implement a monolithic service management solution – because that has been proven to not work – and certainly not be cost effective.Finally, Having to manually manage all of the unique processes that exist across different customer groups / business units is very costly and difficult to adapt / change as needed – it is hard for your customers to feel like their needs are uniquely being met by ITWhat we are told consistently by large and complex enterprises like yours is that they CAN NOT afford to choose a solution that ONLY solves the problem in a greenfield environment… its just not facing reality – you MUST choose a solution that equally helps you leverage your existing environment and can help you quickly turn that into a competitive advantage.Are you facing these challenges in your organization? Can you describe some of your unique challenges, or areas that I have not yet described… if I have described them all – can you share some examples of where these challenges have manifested themselves in real situationsBUILD OUT THE SLIDE TO SHOW BUSINESS IMPACT:The key is why this matters at a business level – what is the impact of this problem to your company and how can you calculate what it means to solve these?Deliver times too longIncreased security risksIncreased OpEx & CapEx – across many different frontsConsumers lack choice – this ultimately leads to poor perception of the value of ITUnrealized savings from existing investmentsIT resources, which are precious – are not aligned well to the business top projectsWhich of these business impacts have affected your company? Do you have examples? How have you attempted to measure the impact?
• #11: So how does VMware help companies achieve their desired future state?BUILD OUT THE SLIDE TO SHOW DESIRED FUTURE STATE AND THE GRAPHICOur software solution is called “VMware vCloud Automation Center” and it enables our customers to build and deliver on a desired future state that includes:A Simple, intuitive self-service experience for their internal customersThe ability to automatically fulfill requests (no matter how personalized) – not just provisioning the initial service – but as importantly provide automation, control & management for the entire lifecycle of the serviceThe option to leverage tools that are actually bringing value – in fact, most of our customers tell us that VMware actually makes their existing tools even more powerful and valuableThe ability to easily put their unique processes into our solution – vs what happens with most enterprise software solutions, where you have to change the way you operate to fit how a product works… And again, our customers achieve this desired future state QUICKLY. This has been proved in production time and again, the ability to incorporate their unique processes and critical tools – in hours and days – not months or years – and do a large majority of this work on their own vs. being reliant on our professional services organization.As the graphic depicts, our approach conceptually is referred to as “Operations Virtualization”This is a concept we have coined…and it’s a very powerful one…If you think about the power of virtualization of the infrastructure, it was all about abstracting or insulating the operating system and the application layer from the underlying HW (so if you change a network card or upgrade memory, the OS is not impacted and isn't even aware)Well conceptually, Operations virtualization is the same thing - but applied at the Operations layer – this is even a larger scale – and potentially even more valuableThe result is the end users or consumers of IT services are completely abstracted or insulated from the complexity of the fabric… the intricacies of managing and delivering in order to provide the end serviceBUILD OUT THE SLIDE TO SHOW THE BUSINESS IMPACT:If done correctly, the business impact is significant and measureable. The business cases we help our customers with have quantifiable metrics in areas such as:Overall lower cost and time to deliver IT servicesImproved ROI from existing investmentsReduced risk (security, compliance, etc)An increase in customer satisfactionThe ability to reallocate resources to higher impact projectsReduced OpEx and CapExMaking IT a strategic advantage to your companyAgain, our goal in working with you on this project is to help you document and quantify the business impact of achieving this future state. Just about everyone of our customers is building out this next generation service and then presenting / selling it to their customers – we help every step of the way and align our success to yours.Any questions at all on this desired future state we are helping companies achieve? Is this in line with what your company’s goals? Would you add anything to this?
• #12: vCloud Automation Center delivers cloud automation for Infrastructure and Desktop as a service, while vFabric Application Director delivers cloud automation for platform as a service automation. Both of these products will be converging in the coming months.
• #13: Increasingly, customers want the ability to deliver IT services on demand, with the ability to provision those services on different clouds and platforms depending on workload requirements, compliance and security issues, and cost. VMware’s Cloud Automation solution – vCloud Automation Center – addresses today’s still highly manual process of provisioning services by abstracting the core tasks, automating these tasks, and centralizing the access and control of these automations.Automation is useful but when you can link automation with policy you really have something powerful.Policy-based control and governance gives you the ability to control the application of automations that drive your cloud.vCloud Automation Center’s service portal and catalog provides end users – whether in IT or the LOB – with self-service, on-demand access to authorized services.The solution automatically provisions infrastructure, platform and desktop services according to policy and enables management of services across their lifecycle, including updates and eventual retirement.While we believe that vSphere provides the optimal environment for your applications, VMware recognizes that data centers often include more than just VMware products running within a vSphere-based private cloud. Customers want the flexibility to leverage existing investments whether in other hypervisors or physical infrastructures, as well as the flexibility to provision directly to the public cloud.To ensure that you can address this entire landscape supporting your services, VMware delivers a service automation solution that is multi-platform and multi-cloud.
• #18: One of the most important capabilities our solution provides is the capability to deploy applications top down using “application blueprints. A blueprint describes the deployment topology of an application. Here you see an application blueprint within Application Director. A blueprint is based on the principle of loosely coupling and it allows you to abstract the application from the infrastructure. This provides unprecedented choice in terms of what infrastructure should be chosen to best fit the requirements of the application. The loosely coupled model furthermore is a key to provide more stable and robust applications. The process of creating a blueprint streamlines the deployment process since only the application architect, rather than dozens or people or teams are required to deploy applications. Manual steps are largely eliminated and much of the process is automated. The components of the blueprint are reusable so there is no need to re-create them over and over again. The Blueprint provides a master template so that all applications deployed into dev, test or production are configured in exactly the same way. This eliminates a big source of configuration differences, which require time intense manual rework. Of course it is possible to make changes to standard configurations within specific deployment blueprints as needed.
• #20: This top down approach requires a standardized set of best practices application components. There are components containing the Vmware templates for the operating system, there are components for the middleware components (e.g. application servers such as tomcat) and lastly there are components for the application services such as java war files. The components can be reused instead of duplicating efforts over and over again. The components should be built and created using a best practices approach and once they are tested, they will immediately increase the quality of services. VMware provides a rich set of application components out-of-the-box and and access to a market place where our partners have created many components. All of these options combine to provide a rich out-of-the-box experience for our customers. On top of that Vmware provides a framework so that additional components can easily be created. Components provide a fantastic way of standardization, which is an elegant way to avoid many issues which plague IT today. IT can approve components before they are published, so IT can control what software is being distributed within the organization. The sprawl of non – standard software is being reduced. Cost and complexity from using unauthorized O/S’s, middleware, and service components can be contained.
• #24: Continuous integration means that as soon as the code change is ready it gets pushed towards productionJenkins calls Rest API’s (or CLI) in AppD to kick of deployment. Script in Jenkins calls AppD Deployment profile->Update profile->Automated deployment of app and changes
• #27: VMware and Puppet Labs have been partnering to create a compelling joint solution. Puppet Labs complements VMware’s Cloud Automation solution by increasing the level of automation, specifically around configuration management and configuration drift remediation. Puppet Labs provides 1000’s of out of the box modules, which can be used in vCloud Automation Center to describe configurations of OS, networks and storage, middleware components and applications. Those modules were created by a very active Puppet “Forge” marketplace community. Puppet Forge modules can be combined with well-tested Services and multi-machine Blueprints available from Cloud Management Marketplace. This enables businesses to build comprehensive multi-machine Blueprints using pre-built modules to simplify automation efforts and ultimately they increase agility.Configurations tend to drift over time and Puppet provides capabilities to maintain the desired state of configurations through drift analysis and remediation. This complements the vCAC governance and lifecycle capabilities to increase the level of control throughout the lifecycle. Lastly, Puppet as well as vCAC supports heterogeneous environments such as hybrid clouds. Customers have the flexibility to deploy any service into any destination. (Lastly vCAC workflows (i.e. vCO) can easily be integrated with the Puppet workflow engine.)VMware continues to tightly partner with Puppet Labs and we intend to release a series of tight integrations in the near future.