Enhancements in version 2.1.00

Virtual firewall rule management

From the BMC My Cloud Services Console, cloud end users can add, edit, and delete firewall rules for their service instances and compute containers. Cloud organization administrators can also add, edit, and delete rules for virtual firewalls in a network container that is assigned only to their company.

From the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management Administration Console, cloud administrators can add, edit, and delete firewall rules for a network container and can specify firewall rules in service blueprints.

When creating a virtual firewall rule, you can set the following options:

Status — Choose enabled or disabled.
Allow Traffic — Choose deny or permit.
Transport Protocol — Select the protocol.
Description — Enter a description for the rule.
Source — Select one of the following for the source address:
- Host Address — Enter the host address.
- Network Address and Network Mask — Enter the network address and mask.
Destination — Select one of the following for the following for the destination address:
- Host Address — Enter the host address.
- Network Address and Network Mask — Enter the network address and mask.
Application Protocol — Select an application protocol or enter a Port number.

See the following for more information:

Virtual load balancer management

From the BMC My Cloud Services Console, cloud end users can add and remove servers from a virtual load balancer pool. Cloud tenant administrators can perform the following tasks to manage virtual load balancer pools for servers for their organization:

Add virtual load balancer pools to servers
Remove virtual load balancer pools from servers
Enable or disable a virtual load balancer pool

From the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management Administration Console, cloud administrators can perform the following tasks to manage virtual load balancer pools for servers in the cloud:

create or delete virtual load balancer pools
add or delete entries in a virtual load balancer pool
enable or disable entries in a virtual load balancer pool

Note

Load balancer pools created with BMC BladeLogic Network Automation version 8.1.1 or earlier are not compatible with BMC BladeLogic Network Automation version 8.1.2. When you delete per 8.1.2 pools using BMC BladeLogic Network Automation 8.1.2, the deletion will fail with errors.

BMC recommends that you delete existing load balancer pools before upgrading to BMC BladeLogic Network Automation 8.1.2 and recreate them using BMC BladeLogic Network Automation 8.1.2.
Alternatively, you can temporarily modify the delete-lb-pool custom action in BMC BladeLogic Network Automation 8.1.2 to skip the command that attempts to delete the heartbeat probe. This should only be a temporary change since load balancer pools created using 8.1.2 will need to have the heartbeat probe deleted when the pool is deleted.

Maintenance mode option

Cloud administrators can turn on maintenance mode to ensure that cloud users cannot make service requests during the maintenance of key cloud components. The cloud administrator can also enter a message that is displayed to cloud end users when they attempt to make cloud service requests when maintenance mode is enabled. BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management API calls also recognize maintenance mode and block requests that attempt to make changes while maintenance mode is enabled.

You can enable or disable Maintenance Mode and add the message from the Configuration workspace, as described in Configuration-workspace-overview.

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management API calls also recognize maintenance mode and block requests that attempt to make changes while maintenance mode is enabled. If you send an API request while maintenance mode is enabled, you will receive an error response that contains error code BMC-CLMT-11500030 and a message that states the requested operation is not available when the system is in maintenance mode.

Onboarding existing network configurations

If you have your networking infrastructure already set up and working before implementing BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management, you can continue to use your existing network and use BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management to provision virtual machines. BMC BladeLogic Network Automation can use predefined port group names and pass them to BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management. For more information, see Onboarding-existing-network-configurations.

Statement of Capacity report

The new Statement of Capacity report is used primarily for licensing calculations and displays:

The daily maximum number of managed servers for the specified reporting period
The average daily maximum number of managed servers for the specified reporting period

Managed servers refers to number of active servers that were provisioned by BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management. For detailed information, see Viewing-the-Statement-of-Capacity-report.

Service blueprints

You can now include additional parameters for the Virtual Load Balancer (VLB) Pool in the Service Blueprint Definition editor.

You can select a VLB Pool parameter from a select list of vendors and device types, and then enter values for it. For more information, see Creating-service-deployment-definitions-and-resource-sets.