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The Virtualization Practice

Product Review:

Dell VIS Creator

Bernd Harzog Analyst – Virtualization Performance and Capacity Management Analyst – IT as a Service The Virtualization Practice CEO – APM Experts

Version 1.0 March 2012 © 2012 The Virtualization Practice. All Rights Reserved.

All other marks are property of their respective owners.

Abstract

Virtualization has taken many data centers by storm. Impressive returns have been achieved

through the server consolidation that is enabled by basic virtualization.

But, a more profound change to how IT operates is enabled by virtualization. That change is

based upon fundamental change to IT processes which are made possible by the addition of

cloud management solutions on top of a virtualization platform. The addition of cloud

management to a virtualization platform enables the delivery of a variety of services on a self-

service basis (with the necessary approvals and controls), and automates many tasks that are

very manual and very time consuming today.

Cloud management solutions also represent a strategic decision for many IT organizations, as

they are the natural next step beyond virtualization platforms. However, since many

organizations already have, or plan to have multiple virtualization platforms, this raises the issue

of whether or not enterprises will build complete management stacks on top of each

virtualization platform (as they mistakenly did for multiple physical platforms), or whether the

correct path is to draw a line on top of the virtualization platforms and implement a unified

management stack on top of all of them.

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Table of Contents

I. Virtualization – High Level Benefits .......................................................................... 3

II. Private Cloud Management – The Next Step ........................................................... 3

III. Criteria for Cloud Management Solutions ............................................................... 4

Support for Multiple Virtualization Platforms ...................................................................... 4

Design for Change ............................................................................................................. 4

Control the Cost of Agility .................................................................................................. 5

Guarantee Resources for Business Critical Workloads ..................................................... 5

Support your Clouds, and Others ...................................................................................... 5

Show your Constituents the Costs of their Actions ............................................................ 5

IV. Dell VIS Creator Product Review .............................................................................. 6

Dell VIS Creator Product Overview ................................................................................... 6

Self-Service Deployment with Governance ....................................................................... 7

Group Administration ....................................................................................................... 11

Enterprise Administration ................................................................................................ 12

Provisioning Groups ........................................................................................................ 17

Lifecycle Management ..................................................................................................... 19

Reports ............................................................................................................................ 20

VDI .................................................................................................................................. 21

V. Business Case for Private Clouds .......................................................................... 22

8. Summary .................................................................................................................... 23

VI. About Dell ................................................................................................................... 23

VII. About The Virtualization Practice ........................................................................... 23

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I. Virtualization – High Level Benefits

Virtualization of server, storage, network, and desktop computing resources dramatically

changes the composition of the infrastructure that supports the entire IT environment.

Many good things come out of this process including:

1. Dramatic consolidation of physical resources leading to equally dramatic hard dollar

savings in the acquisition of and support of physical resources

2. A more compact and centralized environment, which is therefore in and of itself easier

to manage than its more distributed predecessor

3. A more reliable environment since pools of resources allow work to be shifted away

from impaired resources before they impact service levels

4. Dramatically easier disaster recovery since much of the environment can now be

recreated in a different location merely by copying the files that comprise the

virtualized systems

5. Much shorter cycles from QA to pilot to production, as migration of new applications

and migration of new versions of existing applications also only requires the copying

of files that contain the new versions from the pilot to the production infrastructure

6. A generally more responsive and dynamic IT organization that can actively participate

and in some cases even drive business agility initiatives

II. Private Cloud Management – The Next Step

However, virtualization alone does not provide the IT organization with the agility that it

needs in order to promote and facilitate the level of business agility that many

organizations are striving to achieve.

Furthermore, since most virtualization initiatives have already successfully virtualized the

low hanging fruit (easy to virtualize servers) in the environment, what is left to virtualize is

the business critical applications. Virtualizing these will not provide for the kind of

consolidation ratios that fueled the CAPEX savings that were the basis of the first

generation ROI for virtualization.

Therefore what is needed is a new source of ROI to fuel the next phase of virtualization.

That ROI is OPEX savings from automation of IT and business processes, enabled by the

virtualization platform and implemented via cloud management solutions. Therefore cloud

management solutions hold the key not only to automating and streamlining currently

manual IT processes, but also to the ROI that will power the next phase of virtualization.

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III. Criteria for Cloud Management Solutions

Implementing a private cloud involves creating a management system that can deal with

several extremely important tradeoffs. You want self-service, but you want self service that

is controlled by policies and approvals – allowing you to strike the proper balance between

rapid service of business constituents and ensuring compliance and control. You want to

streamline the process and the effort required to provision new services for constituents,

but you also want to make sure that the proper checks and balances are in place. Finally

you want to fully leverage the value that your virtualization platform provides you, but you

do not want your private cloud initiative to be held hostage to the limitations of your current

and potential future virtualization platforms.

For these reasons it is very important to consider the following criteria when choosing a

private cloud management solution:

Support for Multiple Virtualization Platforms

One of the reasons that management is such a complicated and expensive mess in the

physical world is that many enterprises implemented various overlapping management

products for each variation of infrastructure that they purchased. This resulted in a

confusing mish-mash of software, painful and time-consuming processes to get things

changed, and much higher than necessary operations support costs.

In order to avoid repeating this mistake when it comes to private clouds, the first question

you have to ask yourself is, “Do I now have, or will I likely have in the near future, more

than one virtualization platform”? If the answer is yes, then the last thing you want to do is

implement a different private cloud management solution on top of each different

virtualization platform, since all that will do is repeat the management mistakes that were

made in the physical world.

Rather, the appropriate strategy is to draw a line on top of your virtualization platforms and

implement one set of management solutions on top of them all. This is particularly

important for cloud management solutions as you will define your next generation IT

processes in your cloud management solution and there is no payoff to doing this more

than once.

Design for Change

There is one thing you can count on for certain: Your business colleagues do not know

today what they are going to want tomorrow. In order to deal with uncertain future

demands, it is critical to design an IT infrastructure that can easily scale and change to

meet future and currently unanticipated business needs. The critical design criteria for

private clouds is therefore how quickly it and you can respond to a completely new and

previously unarticulated business need and opportunity.

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Control the Cost of Agility

It is a wonderful thing to provide the ability for your constituents to serve themselves with

IT resources and services. However, it is also necessary to provide those services at the

lowest possible cost, and to make sure that they are automatically de-provisioned when

they are no longer in use. If you do not put in the controls on the front end to manage

resource consumption when services are in operation, and to shut them down

automatically when they are no longer needed, you will end up with infinite demand for

capacity with no budget to fund it.

Guarantee Resources for Business Critical Workloads

One of the fears that business constituents have about running their workloads in private

clouds is the fear of not knowing what else will be competing for the resources required by

their workloads. This fear needs to be addressed with the ability to schedule and

guarantee resources for workloads that must deliver a certain level of service and that

take priority over less important tasks.

Support your Clouds, and Others

While the initial intent of your private cloud may well be to allow your constituents to get IT

as a Service as easily and cheaply from you as they can from a public cloud provider, the

fact of the matter is that it will still make sense to run some workloads in public clouds at

certain periods of time. This could easily occur if you face unanticipated demand for a

particular service and need to relocate some lower priority tasks to a public cloud in order

to temporarily free up some capacity. The key is to be able to provision in the right place at

the right time under the same set of consistent policies and procedures.

Show your Constituents the Costs of their Actions

It is great to be a responsive and flexible provider of IT services. If you do a great job of

this, you will likely find that your business constituents have a nearly infinite level of

demand for such easy-to-consume services. In order to keep the level of demand under

control, it is therefore critical that your business constituents understand the cost of their

actions and their requests via a showback mechanism in your private cloud management

offering.

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IV. Dell VIS Creator Product Review

Dell VIS Creator Product Overview

The Dell Virtual Integrated System (VIS) portfolio is Dell’s enterprise private cloud solution.

It enables IT organizations to speed service delivery and move from an inflexible, static

infrastructure to a more dynamic, cloud-based approach to support business growth and

change. Dell VIS Creator, which is part of the VIS portfolio, uniquely meets the above

criteria, and it is the leading private cloud management solution on the marketplace today.

The diagram below depicts the overall features and operation of the VIS Creator solution.

Pairing VIS Creator it with vStart, as shown in the diagram below, Dell delivers a pre-

integrated infrastructure and private cloud management solution that enables IT and

business stakeholders to accelerate application and IT service delivery. Leveraging

VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V, IT organizations can use this solution as a just-in-

time, business-ready platform to support their key initiatives, allowing them to focus on

delivering on business priorities instead of building infrastructure.

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Self-Service Deployment with Governance

When a user logs into their self-service portal in VIS Creator, the first thing they see is the

status of the services and machines that they have deployed for themselves and their

workgroup.

For any of the resources that are currently assigned to that user, that user has a variety of

options available for how to manage those resources. The options available to the user

are controlled by either the group administrator or the enterprise administrator for the VIS

Creator cloud management system.

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In the case below, a richer set of actions is available for a virtual machine in the private

cloud than are available for the virtual machine in the public cloud below.

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When the user wants to deploy a new machine, he is presented with a list of pre-built and

pre-approved templates from which the new machine will be built. These are defined by

either the group administrator or the enterprise administrator.

The user decides to request a new machine built off of the CS Sharepoint 2010 template.

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Once this machine has been requested, it shows up in the list of the user’s resources in a

requested status.

The Group Administrator now can approve or reject the request on the part of the user for

the new Sharepoint virtual machine.

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Once the approval is granted, the virtual machine is automatically and completely

deployed by VIS Creator for the user. It then shows up in the user’s resource status

window in a Provisioned state.

The benefits of this process are both measurable and intangible. From a time perspective,

the user can get a new workload deployed in just minutes instead of hours, days or even

weeks. From a dollar perspective, time is money, and that can equate to productivity

gains thanks to fast workload deployment, and so the cost and productivity difference

between hours and weeks can be staggering. The intangible value is in the improved

reputation that IT gets from its constituents as a result of delivering outstanding customer

service to them at a rate the business demands.

Group Administration

VIS Creator supports two levels of administration. The Enterprise Administrator controls

the entire system. However, the Enterprise Administrator can delegate administrative

rights to as many Group Administrators as necessary in order to support the needs of the

business units and departments in the organization. The screen shot below depicts the

functionality of one Group Administrator.

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Enterprise Administration

The Enterprise Administrator has the same group administration capabilities shown for the

Group Administrator above, but also has a unique set of capabilities shown in the diagram

below. This shows the power and flexibility of the VIS Creator administration system as

delegated administration provides for the best possible combination of enterprise control

and workgroup productivity.

Blueprints or templates for services and services are one of the powerful features in VIS

Creator. Enterprise Administrators have a variety of fine-grained control over Blueprints,

including with which groups they are shared with, as shown in the diagram below.

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When it comes time to create a new Blueprint, a great deal of the flexibility and power of

VIS Creator becomes apparent. The exact same Blueprint creation process is used no

matter which underlying virtualization platform the Blueprint will be provisioned for and

executed on. As you can see from the diagram below, VIS Creator has support for

VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft virtualization platforms, serving as a single interface and

thus eliminating separate platform siloes.

When a Blueprint is created, the Enterprise Administrator can also specify the minimum

level of resources for the service, the maximum level of resources and at what level of

resource approval must be granted. This is a critical part of ensuring the users do not

overprovision resources and waste resources that can both be used by other services and

that in cases like VMware vSphere 5 virtual memory are subject to license fees. VIS

Creator can thus have dramatically positive effects on minimizing the needs for more

virtual machines under management, on reducing virtual machine sprawl, and on

understanding the correct amount of memory allocation per virtual machine.

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As a part of creating a new Blueprint, the Enterprise Administrator assigns a Provisioning

Workflow to the Blueprint. This specifies the steps that will be taken to provision the image

once the system is told to go build it.

Many business constituents and applications owners are reluctant to run their applications

in dynamic and shared private cloud environments due to the fear of performance issues

caused by “noisy neighbors”, or low priority workloads that contend for the same

resources that business critical workloads rely upon. VIS Creator solves this problem by

allowing resource reservation policies to be assigned to Blueprints ensuring that the most

important workloads are always treated as such. Many IT leaders would say that the

value and peace of mind that come with being able to guarantee resources to business

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critical workloads with VIS Creator can be measured only in the reduction of sleepless

nights.

Finally, VIS Creator offers fine-grained control over who can do what to each virtual

machine image. This ensures that while many people may have the right to get rapid self-

service of images that will end up serving a group of people, not everyone has the right to

shut those services down, power that image off, or expire it entirely. IT can therefore

maintain the required level of cost control over expensive computing resources while

delivering the benefit of an agile, self-service management system. The value here is far

from limited to just operational cost savings. Capital cost savings that come from

eliminating over provisioning, better leveraging tiered service levels, and automating

resource reclamation can account for a majority of companies’ savings from moving to a

private cloud.

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Provisioning Groups

The Enterprise Administrator has the ability to create, manage and delete Provisioning

Groups.

The ability to manage a Provisioning Group includes the ability to determine the

capabilities of the people to whom certain administrative roles are delegated. This helps

promote organizational productivity, as management capabilities can be pushed down to

the departments that need them, while also preserving centralized control.

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Also included in the ability to manage Provisioning Groups is a powerful ability to assign

and reserve a rich variety of computing resources to the group. This allows the work of

entire business units (for example a business unit with revenue generating and

performance critical applications) to be assigned Tier 1 resources, and prevents wasting

those resources on lower priority groups and their workloads. It can also allow IT to free a

lot of its staff formerly dedicated to manually processing workload deployment and change

requests and reassign them and their budgets to projects that can drive additional value to

IT and the business.

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Lifecycle Management

Lifecycle management is an essential element of a viable enterprise class private cloud

solution. It is essential because only through lifecycle management can workloads that

have been abandoned by their users be de-commissioned and have their resources

reclaimed. In the example below, all of the workloads that are only using 5% or less CPU

are quickly found.

The administrator can then send a request to the owner of the workload, requesting that it

be decommissioned.

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Reports

VIS Creator contains a rich set of reports that lets you keep on top of your private cloud,

its resources, and who is using them. As shown below, this includes your deployed

services by State, Group, Blueprint, and Reservation.

It is essential to a well-run private cloud that the business constituents who benefit from

the quality and speed of self-service provided by the private cloud are fully aware of the

costs of their actions. To this end, VIS Creator provides a rich set of Chargeback and

Showback reports that provide this information in detail. Many IT organizations will want a

chargeback view with full costing for usage of infrastructure, while others will be satisfied

with a showback view that gives them the visibility needed to help support and understand

application and IT service needs relative to the infrastructure resources in their

environment.

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VDI

VIS Creator delivers unique value among private cloud management offerings in that it

contains deep integration with popular systems for centralizing end user computing like

VMware View, Citrix Provisioning Server, Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix XenApp. This

allows the images that run the end user’s workloads in these scenarios to be provisioned

and managed just like server workloads, and from just a single interface.

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V. Business Case for Private Clouds

The historical ROI of virtualization driven by consolidating workloads running tactical

workloads is not going to drive the further penetration of virtualization in organizations.

Virtualization needs a new ROI based upon improvements in IT Operations, and the

contribution of those improvements to organizational agility and OPEX. Private Clouds

contribute to this ROI in the following manner:

1. By automating the tasks of responding to user and business requests for computing

services, private clouds reduce the cost of processing these requests (which drives

down OPEX). Freeing up IT staff formerly dedicated to manually processing change

requests also frees these people and their budgets to perform tasks more valuable to

IT and the business.

2. By reducing the cycle time to implement these requests (which enables technical and

business agility), private clouds put IT in the position to provide excellent customer

service to IT’s constituents.

3. Delivering excellent customer service to the constituents of IT improves IT’s reputation

in the organization, which in turn makes it easier to get headcount and budget for

projects that add value to the business.

4. Providing service that is as convenient and cost effective as a public cloud vendor

prevents business constituents from “going around” IT and provisioning services in

public clouds that may involve sensitive data or performance requirements that public

clouds are in no position to address.

5. Redeployment of valuable architects out of “baby-sitting” roles into roles that more

actively drive virtualization throughout the enterprise. This is a corollary to point #1,

but an important one due to staffing restrictions that have been plaguing IT

organizations since the economic downturn began in 2008 and creating a “new

normal” in which IT needs to operate using fewer administration resources and

minimal operational expenses while the demand for IT services and applications is

constantly increasing.

6. Providing an agile self-service system with rich delegated administration capabilities

maximizes organizational productivity, while maintaining the required level of

centralized control over expensive computing resources.

7. Providing the ability to guarantee resources to business critical workloads via

reservations allows the private cloud to address more than the tactical and transient

workloads that were appropriate for first generation private clouds.

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8. Summary

Dell VIS Creator is a market leading private cloud management platform. Combined with

vStart for Dell Private Cloud, it is enabling organizations to transform their data centers,

leveraging existing VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V investments as required or

desired, to meet new business and customer demands, helping them achieve more,

deliver real results faster, maximize efficiency and remain focused on delivering value for

their customers. It combines the concepts of self-service, automation, centralized control,

delegated administration, and guaranteed resource reservations into one integrated

solution that supports multiple virtualization platforms. It is therefore ideal for any

enterprise that wants to bring the benefits of virtualization to the next set of applications,

while promoting technical agility, business agility and delivering substantial savings in

operational and capital expenditures.

VI. About Dell

Technology has always been about enabling human potential, but only if that technology

works harder to provide practical solutions to real-world problems. That’s how success is

defined at Dell. Dell creates efficient, easy-to-use solutions that reduce complexity and let

you focus on doing and achieving more of what’s important to you and your company. For

more information about how you can do this with VIS Creator, vStart and the broad VIS

portfolio, visit www.dell.com/viscreator, www.dell.com/vstart or www.dell.com/vis.

VII. About The Virtualization Practice

The Virtualization Practice is the leading online resource of objective and educational

analysis focusing upon the virtualization and cloud computing industries. Bernd Harzog is

the Analyst for Cloud Management at The Virtualization. Bernd was formerly a Gartner

Group Research Director focusing upon the Windows Server operating system, CEO of

RTO Software, VP of Products of Netuitive and has been involved in vendor and IT

strategy since 1980.