Networking enhancements

This release includes the following networking enhancements:

Reprovisioning network containers

The reprovisioning operation allows you to update a network container structure by adding new components to the container or updating existing entities in the container using a new revision of the network container blueprint. This reprovisioning capability enables you to scale the container by adding new components, such as NICs, load balancers, and firewalls.

For example, you may want to do any of the following modifications to a network container after it has been created:

• Expand the private data network
• Expand the NAT address pool
• Add a network
• Add a network interface
• Add a zone
• Enable or disable a distributed firewall

For details, see Reprovisioning network containers.

Support for distributed firewalls

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management supports the management of distributed firewalls (such as the Cisco Virtual Security Gateway (VSG) appliance) from the Manager Firewall Rules dialog box. Distributed firewalls, also called transparent hypervisor firewalls or layer 2 firewalls, protect traffic flowing between VMs.

For details, see Managing distributed firewalls.

Synchronizing network pods

This version of BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management adds the capability to update a pod after it has been onboarded. This capability enables you to scale a pod when necessary.

For example, a pod might be running out of virtual ports for virtual machine (VM) provisioning, because the pod was originally configured with one vswitch and a maximum of 120 virtual ports. You can update the pod with an additional access switch, which will provide more virtual ports for any new network containers that are created for the pod.

For details, see Synchronizing network pods.

Logical Network selection

A new placement algorithm for Logical Network selection is available in this release. This feature is optional.

If enabled, the algorithm calculates available capacity for all selected networks and selects the one with the highest capacity.

The algorithm is executed only if both of the following are true:

• You have enabled the AccessAttributeValue option in the Platform Manager Configuration file (providers.json)
• More than one network gets selected based on either Tags or Network Label provided in the Service Blueprint for the network

If both of the above true, then the algorithm looks at total capacity and used capacity, and calculates the available capacity for each matching network. The network with the highest available capacity is selected for the SOI.

The AccessAttributeValue option for Capacity Based Network Selection is provided for the Execution Fabric Manager provider in the providers.json file:

"cloudClass" : "com.bmc.cloud.model.beans.Provider",
  "accessValues" : [ {
    "cloudClass" : "com.bmc.cloud.model.beans.AccessAttributeValue",
    "accessAttribute" : {
      "cloudClass" : "com.bmc.cloud.model.beans.AccessAttribute",
      "datatype" : "BOOLEAN",
      "guid" : "5f77c01e-da95-4977-8ec6-f7c241118599",
      "isOptional" : true,
      "isPassword" : false,
      "modifiableWithoutRestart" : false,
      "name" : "UseCapacityPlacementForLN"
    },
    "attributeValue" : "false",
    "guid" : "fe924642-7de5-4c39-a183-9dcd8f0a26b1",
    "name" : "UseCapacityPlacementForLN"
  } ],

The option is disabled by default. When disabled, the default placement algorithm is used for network selection if more than one network qualifies for the matching criteria of either Tags or Network Label.