Deploying Infrastructure Management in the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management environment

The recommendations captured in this section supplement the recommendations given to deploy Infrastructure Management version 8.6 in the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management environment.

Deploying in a distributed BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management environment

A distributed BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management deployment in one in which one or more customer pods are deployed in a remote location through the Control Tier. This section provides recommendations for deploying the Infrastructure Management management and data collection components in this environment. If you adopt these recommendations, you can minimize network latency issues with regards to metrics aggregation for the cloud constructs.

The figure below depicts a distributed BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management deployment. Here, the Control Tier and two customer payload pods are locally situated, while a third customer payload pod is located in a remote location. Communication between the Control Tier an the remote pod is over a WAN.

In the remote pod scenario, the recommended Infrastructure Management deployment is consistent with the general Infrastructure Management data collection recommendation of locating the collection infrastructure as close to the target environment as possible. That is, in the case of the remote pod, the Infrastructure Management Data Collection Host must be deployed with the remote pod in the distributed location and the Child Server that manages it must be deployed in the Control Tier along with all of the other management servers. This is illustrated below:

In this deployment, communication between the Child Server and the Integration Service of the remote Data Collection Host is over the WAN. In this scenario, the data collection activity is localized at the remote location and only a single communication channel needs to be maintained across the WAN. Also, the intra -BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server traffic is localized on the Control Tier and this minimizes latencies in cross-server coordination and data aggregation.

Brown field

This section addresses the approach to incorporate a pre-existing traditional Infrastructure Management deployment into one that is integrated with BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management. Infrastructure Management deployments encountered in the field today are enterprise focused. That is, they typically manage data center operations with a mix of physical and virtual infrastructure as well as application stacks. The cloud monitoring deployments have tended to be discrete, installed in conjunction with the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management deployment. However, you can choose to reuse a Infrastructure Management installation that is monitoring a virtualized environment and which will also be used in whole or in part to support the new cloud deployment.

To incorporate an existing Infrastructure Management deployment, BMC recommends introducing the existing BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server as a Child Server in the multi-server Infrastructure Management deployment used to support a cloud environment. The virtual environment managed by the existing server, typically, has to be a part of a pod in the BMC Cloud Lifecycle environment. The specific steps to incorporate an existing Infrastructure Management installation into a cloud deployment are as follows:

1. Upgrade the existing Infrastructure Management Server to the latest version.
2. For a base BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management Infrastructure Management deployment, use the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management Installation Planner to:
   1. Install the Central Server.
   2. Use the integrate mode to configure the existing BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server as a Child Server.
   3. Run the Infrastructure Management Data Collection Host installation program to incorporate the existing local agent into the deployment.

For a full license Infrastructure Management deployment:

1. Install the Central Server.
2. Register the existing BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server as a Child Server.
3. Run the Infrastructure Management Data Collection Host installation program to incorporate the existing local agent into the deployment.
4. Enable the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management integration for both, the metrics provider use case and the cloud topology use case.