Cloud resource management

Underneath the management of a cloud are the resources — the vast pools of servers, storage, and networks that come together to deliver the cloud services. These resources must be on-boarded, managed for capacity and performance, and tracked appropriately in the environment.

Initial clouds are often conceived with reasonably homogeneous x86 environments in mind. However, diversity in a cloud environment can come from many places over time. Multiple hypervisors are currently available on the market, and are increasingly being co-mingled in data centers. The dynamic and flexible cloud provisioning environment is often seen as beneficial to non-x86 architectures, as well — from Oracle Solaris to IBM AIX and even to the occasional mainframe. Finally, there may be instances when users will want to use the same mechanisms to provision the occasional physical resource alongside all the virtualized ones.

The BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management solution can manage a broad array of heterogeneous underlying resources, ensuring that you can make the most of your cloud environment, leveraging the right hardware and infrastructure software to deliver against business requirements. Through BMC Atrium Orchestrator adaptors, it can also provision resources in public clouds. More and more workloads can be moved to public clouds, especially low-risk workloads. In fact, public clouds are not only getting more secure, but they are also providing more and more guarantees of their security and service levels.

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management is integrated to provide seamless provisioning of cloud resources from Amazon's Elastic Computing environment. Whether obscured or transparent to the end user, the provisioning of these resources occurs through the same My Cloud Services portal, and can be managed through the same administrative environment as the private cloud.

A unique feature of the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management solution is the network container functionality, which creates isolated and secure virtualized network zones within the cloud. Network containers are often used by organizations to separate cloud services from one another, supporting co-mingled, multi-tenant environments. They create isolated networking environments that can include security zones, firewalls, and load balancers. Once created, cloud services can then be provisioned within them.

Whether beginning as a homogenous cloud environment, or incorporating diversity from the start, the scope of a cloud environment is likely to change over time. With this in mind, the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management solution can address the long-term needs of enterprise-class cloud implementations.

Key benefits of cloud resource management include:

• Define resource pooling
• On-board resources — whether locally or from external service providers
• Enable secure multi-tenancy