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The Virtualization Practice
Product Review:
Dell VIS Creator
Bernd Harzog Analyst – Virtualization Performance and Capacity Management Analyst – IT as a Service The Virtualization Practice CEO – APM Experts
Version 1.0 March 2012 © 2012 The Virtualization Practice. All Rights Reserved.
All other marks are property of their respective owners.
Abstract
Virtualization has taken many data centers by storm. Impressive returns have been achieved
through the server consolidation that is enabled by basic virtualization.
But, a more profound change to how IT operates is enabled by virtualization. That change is
based upon fundamental change to IT processes which are made possible by the addition of
cloud management solutions on top of a virtualization platform. The addition of cloud
management to a virtualization platform enables the delivery of a variety of services on a self-
service basis (with the necessary approvals and controls), and automates many tasks that are
very manual and very time consuming today.
Cloud management solutions also represent a strategic decision for many IT organizations, as
they are the natural next step beyond virtualization platforms. However, since many
organizations already have, or plan to have multiple virtualization platforms, this raises the issue
of whether or not enterprises will build complete management stacks on top of each
virtualization platform (as they mistakenly did for multiple physical platforms), or whether the
correct path is to draw a line on top of the virtualization platforms and implement a unified
management stack on top of all of them.
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Table of Contents
I. Virtualization – High Level Benefits .......................................................................... 3
II. Private Cloud Management – The Next Step ........................................................... 3
III. Criteria for Cloud Management Solutions ............................................................... 4
Support for Multiple Virtualization Platforms ...................................................................... 4
Design for Change ............................................................................................................. 4
Control the Cost of Agility .................................................................................................. 5
Guarantee Resources for Business Critical Workloads ..................................................... 5
Support your Clouds, and Others ...................................................................................... 5
Show your Constituents the Costs of their Actions ............................................................ 5
IV. Dell VIS Creator Product Review .............................................................................. 6
Dell VIS Creator Product Overview ................................................................................... 6
Self-Service Deployment with Governance ....................................................................... 7
Group Administration ....................................................................................................... 11
Enterprise Administration ................................................................................................ 12
Provisioning Groups ........................................................................................................ 17
Lifecycle Management ..................................................................................................... 19
Reports ............................................................................................................................ 20
VDI .................................................................................................................................. 21
V. Business Case for Private Clouds .......................................................................... 22
8. Summary .................................................................................................................... 23
VI. About Dell ................................................................................................................... 23
VII. About The Virtualization Practice ........................................................................... 23
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I. Virtualization – High Level Benefits
Virtualization of server, storage, network, and desktop computing resources dramatically
changes the composition of the infrastructure that supports the entire IT environment.
Many good things come out of this process including:
1. Dramatic consolidation of physical resources leading to equally dramatic hard dollar
savings in the acquisition of and support of physical resources
2. A more compact and centralized environment, which is therefore in and of itself easier
to manage than its more distributed predecessor
3. A more reliable environment since pools of resources allow work to be shifted away
from impaired resources before they impact service levels
4. Dramatically easier disaster recovery since much of the environment can now be
recreated in a different location merely by copying the files that comprise the
virtualized systems
5. Much shorter cycles from QA to pilot to production, as migration of new applications
and migration of new versions of existing applications also only requires the copying
of files that contain the new versions from the pilot to the production infrastructure
6. A generally more responsive and dynamic IT organization that can actively participate
and in some cases even drive business agility initiatives
II. Private Cloud Management – The Next Step
However, virtualization alone does not provide the IT organization with the agility that it
needs in order to promote and facilitate the level of business agility that many
organizations are striving to achieve.
Furthermore, since most virtualization initiatives have already successfully virtualized the
low hanging fruit (easy to virtualize servers) in the environment, what is left to virtualize is
the business critical applications. Virtualizing these will not provide for the kind of
consolidation ratios that fueled the CAPEX savings that were the basis of the first
generation ROI for virtualization.
Therefore what is needed is a new source of ROI to fuel the next phase of virtualization.
That ROI is OPEX savings from automation of IT and business processes, enabled by the
virtualization platform and implemented via cloud management solutions. Therefore cloud
management solutions hold the key not only to automating and streamlining currently
manual IT processes, but also to the ROI that will power the next phase of virtualization.
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III. Criteria for Cloud Management Solutions
Implementing a private cloud involves creating a management system that can deal with
several extremely important tradeoffs. You want self-service, but you want self service that
is controlled by policies and approvals – allowing you to strike the proper balance between
rapid service of business constituents and ensuring compliance and control. You want to
streamline the process and the effort required to provision new services for constituents,
but you also want to make sure that the proper checks and balances are in place. Finally
you want to fully leverage the value that your virtualization platform provides you, but you
do not want your private cloud initiative to be held hostage to the limitations of your current
and potential future virtualization platforms.
For these reasons it is very important to consider the following criteria when choosing a
private cloud management solution:
Support for Multiple Virtualization Platforms
One of the reasons that management is such a complicated and expensive mess in the
physical world is that many enterprises implemented various overlapping management
products for each variation of infrastructure that they purchased. This resulted in a
confusing mish-mash of software, painful and time-consuming processes to get things
changed, and much higher than necessary operations support costs.
In order to avoid repeating this mistake when it comes to private clouds, the first question
you have to ask yourself is, “Do I now have, or will I likely have in the near future, more
than one virtualization platform”? If the answer is yes, then the last thing you want to do is
implement a different private cloud management solution on top of each different
virtualization platform, since all that will do is repeat the management mistakes that were
made in the physical world.
Rather, the appropriate strategy is to draw a line on top of your virtualization platforms and
implement one set of management solutions on top of them all. This is particularly
important for cloud management solutions as you will define your next generation IT
processes in your cloud management solution and there is no payoff to doing this more
than once.
Design for Change
There is one thing you can count on for certain: Your business colleagues do not know
today what they are going to want tomorrow. In order to deal with uncertain future
demands, it is critical to design an IT infrastructure that can easily scale and change to
meet future and currently unanticipated business needs. The critical design criteria for
private clouds is therefore how quickly it and you can respond to a completely new and
previously unarticulated business need and opportunity.
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Control the Cost of Agility
It is a wonderful thing to provide the ability for your constituents to serve themselves with
IT resources and services. However, it is also necessary to provide those services at the
lowest possible cost, and to make sure that they are automatically de-provisioned when
they are no longer in use. If you do not put in the controls on the front end to manage
resource consumption when services are in operation, and to shut them down
automatically when they are no longer needed, you will end up with infinite demand for
capacity with no budget to fund it.
Guarantee Resources for Business Critical Workloads
One of the fears that business constituents have about running their workloads in private
clouds is the fear of not knowing what else will be competing for the resources required by
their workloads. This fear needs to be addressed with the ability to schedule and
guarantee resources for workloads that must deliver a certain level of service and that
take priority over less important tasks.
Support your Clouds, and Others
While the initial intent of your private cloud may well be to allow your constituents to get IT
as a Service as easily and cheaply from you as they can from a public cloud provider, the
fact of the matter is that it will still make sense to run some workloads in public clouds at
certain periods of time. This could easily occur if you face unanticipated demand for a
particular service and need to relocate some lower priority tasks to a public cloud in order
to temporarily free up some capacity. The key is to be able to provision in the right place at
the right time under the same set of consistent policies and procedures.
Show your Constituents the Costs of their Actions
It is great to be a responsive and flexible provider of IT services. If you do a great job of
this, you will likely find that your business constituents have a nearly infinite level of
demand for such easy-to-consume services. In order to keep the level of demand under
control, it is therefore critical that your business constituents understand the cost of their
actions and their requests via a showback mechanism in your private cloud management
offering.
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IV. Dell VIS Creator Product Review
Dell VIS Creator Product Overview
The Dell Virtual Integrated System (VIS) portfolio is Dell’s enterprise private cloud solution.
It enables IT organizations to speed service delivery and move from an inflexible, static
infrastructure to a more dynamic, cloud-based approach to support business growth and
change. Dell VIS Creator, which is part of the VIS portfolio, uniquely meets the above
criteria, and it is the leading private cloud management solution on the marketplace today.
The diagram below depicts the overall features and operation of the VIS Creator solution.
Pairing VIS Creator it with vStart, as shown in the diagram below, Dell delivers a pre-
integrated infrastructure and private cloud management solution that enables IT and
business stakeholders to accelerate application and IT service delivery. Leveraging
VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V, IT organizations can use this solution as a just-in-
time, business-ready platform to support their key initiatives, allowing them to focus on
delivering on business priorities instead of building infrastructure.
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Self-Service Deployment with Governance
When a user logs into their self-service portal in VIS Creator, the first thing they see is the
status of the services and machines that they have deployed for themselves and their
workgroup.
For any of the resources that are currently assigned to that user, that user has a variety of
options available for how to manage those resources. The options available to the user
are controlled by either the group administrator or the enterprise administrator for the VIS
Creator cloud management system.
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In the case below, a richer set of actions is available for a virtual machine in the private
cloud than are available for the virtual machine in the public cloud below.
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When the user wants to deploy a new machine, he is presented with a list of pre-built and
pre-approved templates from which the new machine will be built. These are defined by
either the group administrator or the enterprise administrator.
The user decides to request a new machine built off of the CS Sharepoint 2010 template.
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Once this machine has been requested, it shows up in the list of the user’s resources in a
requested status.
The Group Administrator now can approve or reject the request on the part of the user for
the new Sharepoint virtual machine.
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Once the approval is granted, the virtual machine is automatically and completely
deployed by VIS Creator for the user. It then shows up in the user’s resource status
window in a Provisioned state.
The benefits of this process are both measurable and intangible. From a time perspective,
the user can get a new workload deployed in just minutes instead of hours, days or even
weeks. From a dollar perspective, time is money, and that can equate to productivity
gains thanks to fast workload deployment, and so the cost and productivity difference
between hours and weeks can be staggering. The intangible value is in the improved
reputation that IT gets from its constituents as a result of delivering outstanding customer
service to them at a rate the business demands.
Group Administration
VIS Creator supports two levels of administration. The Enterprise Administrator controls
the entire system. However, the Enterprise Administrator can delegate administrative
rights to as many Group Administrators as necessary in order to support the needs of the
business units and departments in the organization. The screen shot below depicts the
functionality of one Group Administrator.
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Enterprise Administration
The Enterprise Administrator has the same group administration capabilities shown for the
Group Administrator above, but also has a unique set of capabilities shown in the diagram
below. This shows the power and flexibility of the VIS Creator administration system as
delegated administration provides for the best possible combination of enterprise control
and workgroup productivity.
Blueprints or templates for services and services are one of the powerful features in VIS
Creator. Enterprise Administrators have a variety of fine-grained control over Blueprints,
including with which groups they are shared with, as shown in the diagram below.
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When it comes time to create a new Blueprint, a great deal of the flexibility and power of
VIS Creator becomes apparent. The exact same Blueprint creation process is used no
matter which underlying virtualization platform the Blueprint will be provisioned for and
executed on. As you can see from the diagram below, VIS Creator has support for
VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft virtualization platforms, serving as a single interface and
thus eliminating separate platform siloes.
When a Blueprint is created, the Enterprise Administrator can also specify the minimum
level of resources for the service, the maximum level of resources and at what level of
resource approval must be granted. This is a critical part of ensuring the users do not
overprovision resources and waste resources that can both be used by other services and
that in cases like VMware vSphere 5 virtual memory are subject to license fees. VIS
Creator can thus have dramatically positive effects on minimizing the needs for more
virtual machines under management, on reducing virtual machine sprawl, and on
understanding the correct amount of memory allocation per virtual machine.
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As a part of creating a new Blueprint, the Enterprise Administrator assigns a Provisioning
Workflow to the Blueprint. This specifies the steps that will be taken to provision the image
once the system is told to go build it.
Many business constituents and applications owners are reluctant to run their applications
in dynamic and shared private cloud environments due to the fear of performance issues
caused by “noisy neighbors”, or low priority workloads that contend for the same
resources that business critical workloads rely upon. VIS Creator solves this problem by
allowing resource reservation policies to be assigned to Blueprints ensuring that the most
important workloads are always treated as such. Many IT leaders would say that the
value and peace of mind that come with being able to guarantee resources to business
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critical workloads with VIS Creator can be measured only in the reduction of sleepless
nights.
Finally, VIS Creator offers fine-grained control over who can do what to each virtual
machine image. This ensures that while many people may have the right to get rapid self-
service of images that will end up serving a group of people, not everyone has the right to
shut those services down, power that image off, or expire it entirely. IT can therefore
maintain the required level of cost control over expensive computing resources while
delivering the benefit of an agile, self-service management system. The value here is far
from limited to just operational cost savings. Capital cost savings that come from
eliminating over provisioning, better leveraging tiered service levels, and automating
resource reclamation can account for a majority of companies’ savings from moving to a
private cloud.
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Provisioning Groups
The Enterprise Administrator has the ability to create, manage and delete Provisioning
Groups.
The ability to manage a Provisioning Group includes the ability to determine the
capabilities of the people to whom certain administrative roles are delegated. This helps
promote organizational productivity, as management capabilities can be pushed down to
the departments that need them, while also preserving centralized control.
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Also included in the ability to manage Provisioning Groups is a powerful ability to assign
and reserve a rich variety of computing resources to the group. This allows the work of
entire business units (for example a business unit with revenue generating and
performance critical applications) to be assigned Tier 1 resources, and prevents wasting
those resources on lower priority groups and their workloads. It can also allow IT to free a
lot of its staff formerly dedicated to manually processing workload deployment and change
requests and reassign them and their budgets to projects that can drive additional value to
IT and the business.
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Lifecycle Management
Lifecycle management is an essential element of a viable enterprise class private cloud
solution. It is essential because only through lifecycle management can workloads that
have been abandoned by their users be de-commissioned and have their resources
reclaimed. In the example below, all of the workloads that are only using 5% or less CPU
are quickly found.
The administrator can then send a request to the owner of the workload, requesting that it
be decommissioned.
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Reports
VIS Creator contains a rich set of reports that lets you keep on top of your private cloud,
its resources, and who is using them. As shown below, this includes your deployed
services by State, Group, Blueprint, and Reservation.
It is essential to a well-run private cloud that the business constituents who benefit from
the quality and speed of self-service provided by the private cloud are fully aware of the
costs of their actions. To this end, VIS Creator provides a rich set of Chargeback and
Showback reports that provide this information in detail. Many IT organizations will want a
chargeback view with full costing for usage of infrastructure, while others will be satisfied
with a showback view that gives them the visibility needed to help support and understand
application and IT service needs relative to the infrastructure resources in their
environment.
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VDI
VIS Creator delivers unique value among private cloud management offerings in that it
contains deep integration with popular systems for centralizing end user computing like
VMware View, Citrix Provisioning Server, Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix XenApp. This
allows the images that run the end user’s workloads in these scenarios to be provisioned
and managed just like server workloads, and from just a single interface.
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V. Business Case for Private Clouds
The historical ROI of virtualization driven by consolidating workloads running tactical
workloads is not going to drive the further penetration of virtualization in organizations.
Virtualization needs a new ROI based upon improvements in IT Operations, and the
contribution of those improvements to organizational agility and OPEX. Private Clouds
contribute to this ROI in the following manner:
1. By automating the tasks of responding to user and business requests for computing
services, private clouds reduce the cost of processing these requests (which drives
down OPEX). Freeing up IT staff formerly dedicated to manually processing change
requests also frees these people and their budgets to perform tasks more valuable to
IT and the business.
2. By reducing the cycle time to implement these requests (which enables technical and
business agility), private clouds put IT in the position to provide excellent customer
service to IT’s constituents.
3. Delivering excellent customer service to the constituents of IT improves IT’s reputation
in the organization, which in turn makes it easier to get headcount and budget for
projects that add value to the business.
4. Providing service that is as convenient and cost effective as a public cloud vendor
prevents business constituents from “going around” IT and provisioning services in
public clouds that may involve sensitive data or performance requirements that public
clouds are in no position to address.
5. Redeployment of valuable architects out of “baby-sitting” roles into roles that more
actively drive virtualization throughout the enterprise. This is a corollary to point #1,
but an important one due to staffing restrictions that have been plaguing IT
organizations since the economic downturn began in 2008 and creating a “new
normal” in which IT needs to operate using fewer administration resources and
minimal operational expenses while the demand for IT services and applications is
constantly increasing.
6. Providing an agile self-service system with rich delegated administration capabilities
maximizes organizational productivity, while maintaining the required level of
centralized control over expensive computing resources.
7. Providing the ability to guarantee resources to business critical workloads via
reservations allows the private cloud to address more than the tactical and transient
workloads that were appropriate for first generation private clouds.
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8. Summary
Dell VIS Creator is a market leading private cloud management platform. Combined with
vStart for Dell Private Cloud, it is enabling organizations to transform their data centers,
leveraging existing VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V investments as required or
desired, to meet new business and customer demands, helping them achieve more,
deliver real results faster, maximize efficiency and remain focused on delivering value for
their customers. It combines the concepts of self-service, automation, centralized control,
delegated administration, and guaranteed resource reservations into one integrated
solution that supports multiple virtualization platforms. It is therefore ideal for any
enterprise that wants to bring the benefits of virtualization to the next set of applications,
while promoting technical agility, business agility and delivering substantial savings in
operational and capital expenditures.
VI. About Dell
Technology has always been about enabling human potential, but only if that technology
works harder to provide practical solutions to real-world problems. That’s how success is
defined at Dell. Dell creates efficient, easy-to-use solutions that reduce complexity and let
you focus on doing and achieving more of what’s important to you and your company. For
more information about how you can do this with VIS Creator, vStart and the broad VIS
portfolio, visit www.dell.com/viscreator, www.dell.com/vstart or www.dell.com/vis.
VII. About The Virtualization Practice
The Virtualization Practice is the leading online resource of objective and educational
analysis focusing upon the virtualization and cloud computing industries. Bernd Harzog is
the Analyst for Cloud Management at The Virtualization. Bernd was formerly a Gartner
Group Research Director focusing upon the Windows Server operating system, CEO of
RTO Software, VP of Products of Netuitive and has been involved in vendor and IT
strategy since 1980.