Resource management overview

Resource management is the practice of onboarding, pooling, and visualization of resources in the cloud.

The following sections provide an overview of managing cloud resources with BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management:

Cloud resource management basics

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management uses the concept of network pods and containers to enable networking configurations that support a variety of use cases for cloud deployments. Network containers are used to build isolated networking environments, enabling tenant isolation, workload isolation, and data security zones. BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management supports out-of-the-box network container blueprints based on cloud network topologies jointly developed with Cisco.

Networking rules in BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management

The following rules govern network management in BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management:

• A cloud is composed of one or more locations.
• Each location contains one or more pods.
• Each pod contains one or more network containers. A cloud tenant can be assigned one or more network containers. Through policy, a network container is selected based on the end user requesting a service.
• Each network container contains one or more network zones. Each Zone can contain a load balancer and firewall to create security and balancing of workloads that exist within the Zone.
• Each network zone contains one or more networks, which can span network zones, network containers, and pods.

Cloud tiers

Logically, a cloud network is organized into the following tiers:

• Control tier — Represents a set of infrastructure resources required to operate, administer and maintain the cloud infrastructure and the applications hosted in the cloud.
• Workload tier — Represents a set of infrastructure resources used for application hosting.

Infrastructure resources within the tiers can be physical or virtual. Typically, physical resources are dedicated for use within a single tier. Virtual resources can be either dedicated for use within a single tier or shared between tiers, depending on the level of availability and security required of the cloud. Physically, each tier is composed of one or more network pods. The tiers and their pods can be co-located or span multiple geographic locations.

Cloud tiers

_{Back to top}

Role-based access

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management users have access to networking capabilities based on their role:

• Cloud administrators have full access to all network containers within the cloud environment.

• Cloud organization administrators can request service instances, and can manage their own deployed service instances and the service instances belonging to users in that organization.

• Cloud end users can manage the addition and removal of load balancers on a per-compute basis, and manage firewall rules on a per-server basis. By default, cloud end users cannot select the following things, all of which are based on policies configured by the cloud administrator:
  • Specific network containers for provisioning
  • Specific zones
  • Specific networks

Provisioning to network containers

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management uses cloud-administrator defined policies and object tags to help make placement decisions per service instance. Using service blueprints, a cloud administrator can define multi-tier application environments composed of one or more applications and the connections between them. From a deployment model perspective, a cloud administrator can define policies that allow a multi-tier application to:

• Deploy individual applications across multiple zones in a network container.
• Deploy applications into one or more networks within each zone.

This gives the cloud administrator flexibility in creating their networking environment to support simple, single server deployments or more complex application deployments. For example, a cloud administrator could use BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management networking capabilities to support the deployment of a multi-tier app in the following ways:

• Deploy using multiple zones — A cloud administrator could configure a multi-tier application with isolation between application components by using multiple zones. For example, a 3-tier application could be provisioned into a network container with each component going into 1 of 3 zones that each have their own firewalls.
• Deploy using multiple networks — Another way to solve the same use case is to have a network container with only a single zone, with the zone itself mapped to more than one network. In this case, each application component would be provisioned to a different network within the zone.
• Deploy using a combination of multiple zones and multiple networks.

_{Back to top}

Resource provider overview

Within BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management, a resource provider is a software program that supplies resources for the cloud.

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management consumes raw compute, storage, and network resources from a variety of resource providers. These resources are used to create higher-level administrative and hosting abstractions in the cloud to make it easier for cloud administrators to provide cloud-based infrastructure services for users.

For example, if a software development team requests a variety of hardware and operating systems as well as a specific set of applications for testing purposes, the cloud administrator can, if BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management is installed and configured, fulfill the request with little manual intervention.

Raw cloud resources can be physical or virtual, and can include servers, virtual clusters, and storage devices, as well as routers, firewalls and load balancers. BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management can also use resources provided by various public clouds such as Amazon EC2.

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management also consumes software platform resources that are used to provision data and application containers and deploy application components on these resources, making it easy to offer cloud-based application platforms and application services. Some examples of software platform resources are database systems (such as an Oracle RAC clusters) or middleware environments (such as Websphere Network Deployment) . 

Default resource providers

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management has the following default resource providers:

• BMC Server Automation provides compute resources by provisioning physical and virtual servers that can be used in the cloud. Compute resources include physical servers and virtual environments (such as clusters, virtual hosts, and virtual resource pools). BMC Server Automation provides VMware, IBM LPAR, Citrix XenServer, and Microsoft Hyper-V resources.
• BMC Network Automation provides network information to BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management such as network locations names, pods names, IP addresses, and network blueprints.
• NetApp provides block device and file system storage to running server instances.
• Amazon EC2 provides access to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) resources, allowing you to provision service offering requests using Amazon EC2.
• VMware vCloud provides access to VMware vCloud resources, allowing you to provision service offering requests using on the VMware vCloud platform.

These default resource providers can be automatically preregistered during installation using the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management Installer. If preregistered, the resources from the default resource providers are ready to onboard into the system. 

Although BMC Database Automation is currently the only provider for provisioning databases to on-premise database systems, it cannot be automatically preregistered during installation. Users must manually register BMC Database Automation as a provider.

_{Back to top}