Next Generation Cloud Management: a Cloudbolt C2 Analysis

The Virtualization Practice

White Paper: Next Generation Cloud Management: A CloudBolt C2 Analysis

Bernd Harzog Analyst – Cloud Management The Virtualization Practice

June 2013

Abstract

Data center virtualization (the virtualization of servers) has provided dramatic benefits to IT organizations through improved economics driven by server consolidation, and by allowing many servers of many different types to be abstracted into virtual machines which can then be managed more efficiently and with greater IT agility.

However, the virtualization of servers and the associated benefits is just the first step on a journey towards a more fundamentally agile, efficient, dynamic, and responsive IT organization – one that is a true asset to the business, and one that is a source of true business agility and competitive advantage to the business.

Realizing these benefits means that IT organizations will need to combine existing server virtualization efforts, the virtualization of complex multi-tier business critical applications, the self-service aspects of IT delivery commonly associated with public clouds, and highly automated IT operations and service delivery into one IT Operations model.

Running IT with the agility and cycle times associated with a public cloud while addressing the business critical enterprise class workloads that IT is counted on to be able to support will require an entirely new stack of management software than what has prevailed in the legacy physical and static data center.

Next Generation Cloud Management: A CloudBolt C2 Analysis

Table of Contents

I. IT in a Business Context ...... 1

II. Next-Generation Cloud Management ...... 1

III. Required Capabilities of Next Gen Cloud Managers ...... 2

Unbiased Multi-cloud management ...... 2

Easily modified self-service portal (No dev required) ...... 2

Integrates with anything ...... 3

Configuration Management integration ...... 3

Network virtualization integration ...... 4

IV. Benefits of Next Generation Cloud Management ...... 4

Increased business agility ...... 4

Increased IT relevance ...... 5

Rapidly enable private cloud ...... 5

Enable the path to Hybrid cloud ...... 5

Increase value of existing investment ...... 5

Control shadow IT ...... 6

Reduced provisioning times ...... 6

Fully automated self-service ...... 6

Transparent reporting ...... 6

V. IT in a Business Context and CloudBolt C2 ...... 7

VI. About CloudBolt Software ...... 7

VII. About The Virtualization Practice ...... 7

Next Generation Cloud Management: A CloudBolt C2 Analysis

I. IT in a Business Context

What exactly does the business want from IT? This is often very hard for the business to articulate ahead of time as the business usually does not understand enough about IT to be able to articulate its needs to IT in terms that IT can act on.

Part of the problem is that IT organizations are more than just virtualization. Enterprises consist of numerous technologies and resources including multiple storage environments, configuration management tools, public and private cloud technologies, different data center environments, networks, applications, and software licenses. Add to those convoluted and variable organizational structures, that require proper tracking and usage reporting, and you see how a simple Cloud Management solution cannot meet the needs of the business.

Therefore it usually falls upon the shoulders of IT to react as quickly as possible to the demands of the business once those demands are known with enough certainty to be actionable. However the history of IT’s ability to react to the demands of the business has been a far from compelling story with it often taking months or sometimes years to roll out new services.

Virtualization is a game changing technology for the IT department, as it allows IT to react to new and or different requirements very quickly. Virtualization makes it trivially easy for IT to deploy a new server since in many cases that simply means cloning an existing server and starting the new server image, but at the same time, Virtualization alone does not solve the complexities of network, storage and software management.

But improving IT responsiveness alone does not really solve the business problem at hand. Letting IT rapidly create new resources is a completely different thing than empowering the business to meet its own needs.

Therefore translating IT agility into business agility requires an additional layer of software on top of the virtualization or cloud platform. That is the Cloud Management layer that allows IT to define resources to the business that the business can then order up as needed, and then have those services provisioned in a completely automated manner by the Cloud Management layer. Included in the Cloud Management layer is the ability to provision all of the resources (CPU, memory, networking, storage, and applications) that are needed for a business service. And if the need for the service is transient, automatically retire the service and the resource when the need for them expires.

Nevertheless, Cloud Management is the crucial layer of software that must exist in order for IT services to be available to the business on the cycle times demanded by the business. Absent the Cloud Management layer, the manner in which IT operates is simply disconnected from the realities of the rate of change at which a modern business operates.

II. Next-Generation Cloud Management

Simple Cloud Management solutions have existed for quite some time. They got their start as managers of test environments (typified by the now retired VMware Lab Manager product). However in order for Cloud Management solutions to allow for IT Operations to become synchronized with and relevant to the business Cloud Management solutions must deliver dramatically enhanced functionality over what was present in first generation offerings.

Next Generation Cloud Management: A CloudBolt C2 Analysis

The key attribute of a next-generation Cloud Management solution is that it must let the business order and use IT resources in a manner that works for the business. That means that the provisioning of all resources needs to be automated, including deployment and maintenance of applications, that the process for order resources needs to fit the workstyle of each department in the business, and that the business is not constrained with respect to where their workloads run, or its ability to report on all aspects of the use and consumption of those environments.

III. Required Capabilities of Next Gen Cloud Managers

Unbiased Multi-cloud management Cloud Management solutions are offered by many types of vendors. Some are offered by virtualization platform vendors (like VMware with vCloud Automation Center). Some are offered by converged infrastructure vendors like Cisco, HP and Dell. Yet still others are offered by enterprise management framework vendors of enterprise like BMC.

Every vendor of a Cloud Management offering offers some sort of cross-platform support in their product. But every vendor whose primary business is something else besides Cloud Management biases the support for platforms in their Cloud Management offering towards the other products in their product line. The support for vSphere in vCloud Automation Center is superior to the support for other virtualization platforms. Converged infrastructure vendors feature support for their converged hardware stack at the expense of other converged hardware stacks. And enterprise management software vendors feature superior integration with their frameworks at the expense of integration with other frameworks or new and disruptive technology like Puppet or Chef.

Therefore, when assessing the ability of a Cloud Management solution to support multiple virtualization platforms and public cloud platforms, it is essential to consider the economic motivations of the vendors and their likely long-term product strategy. An independent Cloud Management vendor like CloudBolt is not biased towards any particular virtualization platform or hardware stack, nor is CloudBolt biased towards any particular method of low-level data center automation. When CloudBolt says that they support VMware, XenServer, KVM, Amazon, HP Server Automation, Puppet and Chef, then you can count on both robust support for all of these platforms and products, and continued enhancement of that support.

This is a completely different situation than is the case with other cloud management platforms where the support across platforms is biased by a platform vendor today, and will likely continue to be biased as the product roadmap for the Cloud Management solution evolves into the future.

Easily modified self-service portal (No dev required) As mentioned at the start of this paper, in order for IT to be relevant to the business, IT services must be accessible to the business in a manner relevant and appropriate to the different business units, departments and individual roles in the business.

That means that the process by which IT services are presented to users must be customized to the role of the person in the business who is ordering and consuming those services. IT must be able to customize the ordering experience presented by the Cloud Management solution in the Cloud Management solution. This must be done easily and quickly without requiring professional services resources or an SDK from the vendor of the Cloud

Next Generation Cloud Management: A CloudBolt C2 Analysis

Management solution. If fact it would be fair to say that if your Cloud Management solution comes with a 28 page quick-start document, and requires multiple installs, multiple dozens of steps just to get to the configuration, and a significant requirement for consulting in the box, send the box (and the quick-start guide, and the consultant) back to the vendor of the Cloud Management solution.

CloudBolt C2 is delivered as a virtual appliance template that is easily imported into an existing virtualization manager. From there, through 10-12 simple questions, the C2 install wizard will discover and import information about your specified virtualization environment, importing existing VMs, templates, and networks. From there, administrators can begin using C2 to provision new instances. The C2 user interface is intuitive, and can be customized from within the interface itself. IT Administrators can easily set up new groups, environments, and also alter the server provisioning order form appearance and behavior to match the end user’s expectations and understanding.

Integrates with anything The whole point of presenting the business with a simple interface for order business services is to then automate the process of provisioning those services. But not all of those services are always easily provisioned through the API of a virtualization platform like VMware vSphere. In many cases hardware needs to be provisioned. In many cases, operating systems inside of guests need to be provisioned, and services like web servers Java servers and database servers need to be provisioned on top of those guest operating system.

Automating the provisioning of the hardware layers below the virtualization platform and the operating system an services layers above the guest requires integration with products designed to provision those layers. That includes integration with hardware provisioning systems like HP Server Automation, and guest operating and services automation like Puppet or Chef. Also included in this category is the ability to communicate to external workflows or systems as part of the provisioning process. For instance, a Cloud Manager may need to check in with a financial system to ensure the requestor has enough budget overhead to afford the requested resources, or a security scanning system needs to be notified to scan a newly-installed system.

Beyond the bevy of tools that CloudBolt C2 natively integrates with, C2 presents an outbound API interface (called Orchestration Hooks) that allows it to interoperate with other technologies. This enables customers to incorporate one-off or custom workflows, technologies, or processes into the C2 management stream. Through Orchestration Hooks, administrators can pass internal C2 information to external systems, and set other internal parameters based on responses. Orchestration hooks are called up to nine different times throughout the provisioning process in C2, which offers administrators a significant level of workflow configuration choice and flexibility.

Configuration Management integration Many enterprises already have configuration management systems, products that automate configuration changes and products that manage configuration consistency and drift. Since configuration extends down through the virtualization platform into hardware, and up into the guest operating systems and services managing configuration through the virtualization platform is inadequate for most enterprises.

Because Cloud Managers are intended to simplify the overall resource provisioning and management process in enterprise environments, any Cloud Manager that requires additional external tooling, or other significant integration effort to provide application choice to end users works directly against the goals of implementing a cloud manager.

Next Generation Cloud Management: A CloudBolt C2 Analysis

Therefore a credible enterprise-grade cloud management system must be able to integrate with the configuration management systems that the customer already owns and integrate with the products that automate configuration change.

As stated above, enterprises are more than just virtualization. Effective use of Configuration management tools can be a game changer to how IT organizations control and manage the software across the enterprise. CloudBolt C2 understands this, and can directly interact with various configuration management and automation tools including HP Server Automation (you may know it as Opsware), Chef, or Puppet. This integration means that C2 can be used to present users application and configuration choices without said user needing to access the CM tool’s UI. Fully integrating virtualization management with CM is a powerful capability that many vendors try to downplay, because it’s not easy to do, but the team at CloudBolt built C2 from the beginning with this very capability in mind.

Network virtualization integration Software Defined Networking (SDN) is one of the next frontiers of virtualization, data center automation, and cloud management. An early entrant in the SDN space is VMware NVP (by acquisition of Nicira), recently re- announced as VMware NSX that is the combination of the previous VXLAN network virtualization offered by VMware and the new OpenFlow based network virtualization offered by Nicira. The promise of SDN is that the configuration and provisioning of networking will be both simplified and brought closer to the provisioning of the workloads that are using the networks.

SDN creates a major opportunity (and a requirement) for cloud management to provision the networks needed by workloads as those workloads are provisioned from a CPU and memory perspective. In order for SDN to be useful in an organization, IT administrators cannot be required to manually create each and every software- defined network. Enterprises need to be able to automate this as well.

The flexibility built into the CloudBolt C2 architecture allows the overlay of new technologies atop existing environments. The implementation of SDN in the enterprise is just such an example. Although C2 manages the SDN components separately from the virtualization platform-provided networks in SDN-enabled environments, administrators have the same ability to determine which virtual networks are available to which groups or environments. The individual creation and management of the network looks the same in C2, with the only difference being that a SDN-provided network can be made available (assuming the required SDN infrastructure has been installed and configured in that environment) to multiple environments in multiple locations.

IV. Benefits of Next Generation Cloud Management

While data center virtualization alone delivers the benefits of server consolidation and some increases in IT agility, it is the Cloud Management layer of software that turns a flexible IT infrastructure into a set of benefits that impact the entire organization.

Increased business agility Marc Andreessen said “software is eating the world”. What he meant by that is that more and more business processes are being automated by software, and that businesses must automate and innovate via software in order to compete. Agile Development is all about being able to rapidly develop and change applications, but all

Next Generation Cloud Management: A CloudBolt C2 Analysis

of this new software and rapidly changing software has to be put into production and managed once in production.

Cloud Management allows the IT organizations to make development teams and business units who are building and deploying their own software self-sufficient when it comes to the provisioning of the infrastructure required by their applications. This takes IT out of the request and provisioning loop and dramatically reduces cycle times, resulting in dramatic improvements to business agility.

Increased IT relevance With a legacy manual provisioning process, many organizations view IT as a slow, out of date, bureaucratic cost center. With a proper Cloud Management solution in place, IT can be the source of the Business Agility benefits discussed directly above, and therefore can become an enabler of significant business benefits and measurable business results like increases profits and market share.

Rapidly enable private cloud Some vendors of Cloud Management solutions are proud that they can help a customer get a private cloud stood up in 6 months to one year—with significant vendor-provided professional services required to meet this time scale. Any Cloud Management system that takes that long to get up an running is also going to take a long time to evolve as business needs change, and will therefore become an impediment, not an enabler of business agility.

A modern Cloud Management system should be downloadable, and should be installed, configured and up and running in a matter of days. Such a Cloud Management system would allow an IT organization to stand up a private cloud quickly, and more important evolve this cloud in a responsive manner as business needs change.

Enable the path to Hybrid cloud A Cloud Management platform that limits you to one or more data center virtualization platforms, or that cannot span organizational boundaries misses the point. Whether you need a hybrid cloud on day one of your private cloud is besides the point. The point of putting in a cloud is increased flexibility, which needs to include the ability to include a cloud that you do not own into your cloud infrastructure. Hybrid clouds allow you and your business constituents to make intelligent decisions about where to place workloads based upon the requirements of those workloads and the costs of various execution alternatives. The right Cloud Management solution must make provisioning workloads in different clouds transparent to the end users and IT consumers.

Increase value of existing investment When you are using one simple interface to provision all of your workloads, it is much easier to get a true picture of your entire IT estate and the resource requirements of all of your workloads. Next-generation Cloud Management breaks down the infrastructure silos that prevent you from having this view, and therefore exposes resources for use that may not have been visible before.

By way of example if you have 100 business critical applications, and each was previously provisioned separately, you may have provisioned 10 spare servers for each of those applications independently. That is then a total 1,000 spare servers across all of those applications. By provisioning those 100 applications in a resource pool managed by a Cloud Management solution, a far fewer number of servers need to be reserved for collective high availability and spare capacity needs, freeing up the rest to be reclaimed for production work.

Next Generation Cloud Management: A CloudBolt C2 Analysis

An additional example entails looking at existing capital and personnel investments made in technologies already implemented in the data center. Frequently organizations have made significant investments in data center automation tools only to find they end up managing VMs via templates instead. This is both wasteful and unwarranted. A Cloud Management solution that properly enables the use of existing technology ensures that these existing investments provide the purchased capability and functionality, and therefore the intended business benefit used to justify their purchase.

Control shadow IT In many business units and development organizations, the frustration with the manual provisioning process in IT is so high that these constituents go outside of the IT organization to a public cloud provider like Amazon EC2 to procure resources on an on-demand basis. This creates a pool of completely unmanaged IT resources, exposes the organization to security risks, and creates IT expenses that are completely unbudgeted for.

Cloud Management can give business units and development organizations the flexibility to provision workloads in external (public) clouds via the same interface that is used to provision workloads in internal virtualized data centers. This allows the business units and developers the flexibility to provision workloads where it meets there needs, and gives IT an overall view of what kinds of resources are being used for various types of workloads and projects. Effective Cloud Management can also enable the IT organization to ingest and begin managing existing shadow IT silos.

Reduced provisioning times While data center virtualization makes it trivially easy to produce or clone a virtual machine, creating a fully functional virtual server that has the complete set of operating system, middleware, security, management, application components, and has been properly registered with configuration management databases, service catalogs, security, monitoring, and financial systems is still just as time consuming as it is to create a physical instance of that server.

Cloud Management software allows for that level automated provisioning of the entire stack of software in the virtual machine, and the deployment of the required tiers of each layer of the application system into the appropriate virtual data centers.

Fully automated self-service When the automated provisioning of the entire operating systems stack is combined with the customized placement of workloads into a service catalog, Cloud Management solutions allow IT to provide fully automated deployments from self-service requests by the users of the service with no IT intervention. This both speeds up the delivery of the services to the end users and frees up substantial IT resources from repetitive provisioning tasks.

Transparent reporting Since Cloud Management solutions can be used to deploy workloads across multiple virtualization environments and public clouds, they are a natural repository of the information as to what is running where, how many resources are being used, and what it costs to run workloads in various places. Therefore Cloud Management solutions are an excellent source of the reports that are needed for both the business and the enterprise to understand how IT resources are being used across the enterprise.

Next Generation Cloud Management: A CloudBolt C2 Analysis

V. IT in a Business Context and CloudBolt C2

There are many factors that impact how an organization chooses to manage their IT environment. Vendors claiming to solve the technical problems of cloud-focused IT management are numerous, but none outside of CloudBolt C2 enable the same type of transparency and business-focused decisions. Being built from the ground-up as a Cloud Manager, C2 was not intended to replace existing virtualization management, but rather, compliment existing technologies while allowing business to consume and report on IT usage in ways that make sense to the how the business is run and managed.

CloudBolt C2 enables It organizations to simultaneously manage multiple virtualization platforms, hypervisors, public and private clouds, and provides a powerful, configurable self-service portal to present these resources to IT consumers in a predictable, manageable, and business-focused manner.

Self-service IT is made possible through automation, and CloudBolt C2 has a demonstrated track record of integrating with the types of technical and business systems likely being used by many companies, but also provides a flexible architecture which allows IT organizations to integrate new and disruptive technologies to the Data Center without actually disrupting the IT consumers, or the Business itself.

Finally, organizations that implement CloudBolt C2 gain significant intelligence around the use and consumption of resources by various teams, projects, and business units. This intelligence is crucial when making business decisions about which projects to fund because they positively contribute to the business. Beyond the technical capabilities, It is CloudBolt’s business-first approach that most differentiates itself from other vendors in the Cloud Management landscape.

VI. About CloudBolt Software

Founded and run by members of the team that built the HP Server Automation system management and automation software suite, CloudBolt C2 is the next-generation Cloud Manager that enables Business-Driven IT. C2 solves the problem of manual IT provisioning by fully automating virtual and cloud resource provisioning in the data center. C2 makes IT organizations more agile, and delivers a fully commoditized IT environment.

VII. About The Virtualization Practice

The Virtualization Practice is an industry analyst firm focusing upon data center virtualization and cloud computing. Bernd Harzog is TVP’s Analyst for Cloud Management focusing on the Operations, Applications, and Cloud Management layers of the Software Defined Data. Bernd was formerly a Gartner Group® Research Director focusing on the Windows Server® operating system, CEO of RTO Software, and VP of Products at Netuitive®, and has been involved in vendor and IT strategy since 1980.