Calbro Services scenario

Calbro Services is a fictional company that helps to illustrate how BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management principles are used in practice. Learning how Calbro Services uses BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management scenarios should prove useful as you use the solution in your own environment.

Overview of Calbro Services

Calbro Services is a service provider of IT services, with customers ABC Corp. and Samjuston Ltd. Calbro Services wants to offer Gold and Bronze levels of service, and wants to make those levels available as options of services available to tenants. This can be done by creating separate offerings, but Calbro Services opts to use BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management policies to enforce the application of service levels in a single service offering.

Setting up cloud resources

The cloud administrator has VMware virtual clusters configured and onboards these into BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management as compute resources. The cloud administrator onboards 2 VMware clusters, each with 10 hosts. Each host can run a set of Virtual Machines (VMs). One cluster is reserved for high-end performance, and is mapped to a compute resource pool named Gold. The other cluster is reserved for low-end performance, and is mapped to a compute resource pool named Bronze.

The cloud administrator also sets up virtual guest packages (VGPs), system packages (OS), and application component templates (related apps) in BMC Server Automation.

For network resources, the cloud administrator uses the pod and network container blueprints installed with BMC Network Automation to create a pod and two network containers. The cloud administrator onboards the pre-configured pod from BMC Network Automation, and creates the Gold and Bronze network containers in BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management.

The cloud administrator creates a Gold network container for ABC Corp.That network container has 2 zones, with each zone having a firewall and a load balancer. The cloud administrator creates a separate Bronze network container for Samjuston Ltd. That network container has 1 zone, with no firewalls or load balancers.

The cloud administrator maps tenants to resources through network containers, thereby limiting the resources available to users in each tenant. Though the network containers in this scenario are dedicated to each tenant, they will share compute resource pools (Gold and Bronze). The compute resource pools will be associated with service levels in service offerings through the use of tags (Gold and Bronze).

For storage resources, the cloud administrator prepares NAS and SAN storage resources in NetApp. The cloud administrator creates service request definitions to offer the storage resources to technical end users, and creates options for different storage amounts. The cloud administrator then maps the storage offerings to a storage resource provider, making storage resources available as additional requests to existing compute and network services.

Creating tags

The cloud administrator creates a tag group named SLA, which contains individual tags named Gold and Bronze. The cloud administrator applies these tags to the Gold and Bronze compute resource pools. Because ABC Corp. and Samjuston Ltd. each have access to Gold and Bronze compute resources within their network containers, the use of SLA tags ensures that the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management policy engine can identify services and resources that should be used together when an SLA-based service option is requested.

Creating tenants and users

The cloud administrator configures BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management for tenants by creating company records for each tenant. The cloud administrator identifies a tenant administrator at each tenant, and receives a list of end users from each tenant administrator. Based on those lists, the cloud administrator creates accounts for the tenant administrators and end users.

Creating services

The cloud administrator defines the following service offerings that can be requested by all users:

• Red Hat LAMP stack — Offered in three sizes (Small, Medium, and Large), with options for an Apache Web server and MySQL database.
• Windows 2008 — Offered in three sizes (Small, Medium, and Large), with options for an Oracle or MySQL database, PCI compliance, number of CPUs, and amount of memory.

To stand up the servers in each offering, VGPs that include operating systems have been configured in BMC Server Automation.

For both service offerings, the cloud administrator defines service offering options for Gold and Bronze, and uses the Blueprint Configuration Editor to modify the application with the appropriate tag (Gold and Bronze). In the Service Governor, the cloud administrator creates a policy to identify the compute pool to use. He selects the service blueprint as the tag source, and selects the SLA tag group. This specifies that when a user requests a service and opts for Gold or Bronze levels of service, that request is mapped to the correct compute resource pool that uses the same tag, and the resources from that pool are used to fulfill the request.

The cloud administrator creates an option for the user to request backup services, which requires a customization of BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management through the use of callouts.

The cloud administrator creates separate offerings for storage, offering NAS and SAN storage in 50GB, 100GB, and 200GB sizes.

Making services available to users

Lastly, the cloud administrator associates the services with an entitlement package, and maps that package to the ABC Corp. and Samjuston Ltd. tenants. This mapping is required to ensure that users at those tenants can request services.