Whether you are an enterprise IT department or a public service provider, your customers demand timely access to the computing resources needed to run their businesses. Even with a virtual infrastructure in place, provisioning new resources to customers can require you to find out the requirements, create the required virtual machines, and then deploy them accordingly, all of which can exhaust valuable time and effort.
Cloud Manager lets you expose the computing resources in your virtual infrastructure in a manner that enables your customers to easily consume them as business services and you to deliver the services efficiently, automatically, and on time. The following sections explain what Cloud Manager does to transform your virtual infrastructure into flexible, reliable, and secure cloud computing environment:
Typically, customers don’t want to be concerned with the details of your virtual infrastructure. They simply want to select a workload that has the operating system, software, and resources (CPU, memory, network cards, and disk space) to meet their business needs. In addition, they want to ensure that you are providing the appropriate level of service based upon those needs.
Cloud Manager lets you organize your computing resources into a catalog consisting of workload templates and service levels. A workload template identifies a virtual machine and its allocated resources (virtual CPUs, memory, networks, and disk space), while a service level defines the host hardware and service objectives (availability, response time, quality, and so forth) for the workload.
When a customer needs a new workload, he or she creates a business service request that includes the desired workloads and service levels based on the catalog you created. After the request is approved by a financial sponsor and a Cloud Manager administrator, the business service workloads are automatically built and deployed within your virtual infrastructure and made available to the customer for use.
If you have existing virtual machines deployed for customers, you can import them as business services so that your customers can manage their existing and new business services through Cloud Manager.
During the import, you assign the customer as the owner of the business service and assign a service level to the imported virtual machine. If you have multiple virtual machines that should be imported to the same business service, you can do so.
Not all individuals or organizations need the same types of business services. Cloud Manager lets you customize your offerings by creating business groups and determining which workload templates and service levels are available to each group.
You can designate a sponsor in each group who is responsible for financial approval of the group’s business service requests.
Cloud Manager lets you assign costs to the various components associated with running a workload, including the base software license for the workload, the host resources (CPUs, memory, network cards, and disk space), and the service level objectives. The total monthly cost for each workload is recorded in the business service and is available through cost reports.
If cost visibility is not important in your organization, you can hide cost information.