Tenant management overview

This topic describes the concept of tenant management and multitenancy in relation to BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management. The topic contains the following sections:

Introduction to tenant management

A tenant in BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management can be a company, organization, or any other group of users. The use of tenants in the cloud allows a company or service provider to segregate companies or organizations in the cloud, and to control the visibility and permissions to offerings in the Service Catalog.

When you install BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management, a default cloud administrator and a provider company is created. The cloud administrator must create at least one tenant in BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management. After the tenants have been created, they can be associated with entitlement packages that determine the set of service offerings available to those tenants. The cloud administrator can allocate and manage quota for the tenant. For more information, see Quota management overview.

When you install BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management, you create a provider company and a cloud administrator user. The cloud administrator can create other cloud users, such as the Cloud administrator, Cloud tenant administrator, and Cloud end user in BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management. After the users are created, the cloud administrator can allocate and monitor quota to the users, too. 

The cloud administrator can map tenants to network containers, ensuring that some network resources (and the compute resource pools associated to them) are available only to certain tenants.

• Service-provider model — Tenants are individual users or corporate entities that require end-to-end separation. Each tenant gets one or more dedicated network containers, and each network container has a dedicated set of resources for service hosting. The cloud administrator assigns network containers to tenants when tenants are onboarded into the cloud.
• Enterprise model — Tenants are organizations or business units within the enterprise. Network containers are shared between one or more tenants, and resources can be shared between multiple network containers.
• Hybrid model — Tenants can share network containers, but segregation between tenants is not required. For example, some service providers might offer shared commodity hosting and dedicated premium hosting based on different service levels. Some enterprises might isolate certain applications in production.

For more information, see Tenants and Entitlement packages overview.

Multitenancy in BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management

Based on products from Cisco, VMware, and NetApp, the multitenancy architecture is a set of infrastructure design guidelines that creates isolated security zones across a unified pool of infrastructure resources to protect corporate data and applications. The configuration of these infrastructure components is documented and validated for Cisco solutions at the compute and network layers, for VMware solutions at the hypervisor layer, and for NetApp solutions at the storage layer. The picture below illustrates the infrastructure stack.

This multitenancy architecture is designed to meet the following requirements:

• Availability of computing, network connectivity, and storage resources
• Secure separation for isolation of assets
• Service assurance to meet performance requirements
• Management of resource availability and rapid provisioning

Meeting these requirements requires tools to cost-effectively manage the entire infrastructure as a cohesive service offering from a single pane of glass, while assuring compliance with enterprise policies and SLAs.

Related topics

Perform preliminary tasks
Tenant management workspace overview
Quota management overview