1.3 Cloud Manager Components

Cloud Manager consists of a variety of components that you will need to understand as a Cloud Manager administrator. Some of the Cloud Manager components, such as zones and host groups, provide ways to organize your virtual infrastructure resources so that Cloud Manager knows where to run business services. These components are mostly hidden to users. Other components, such as service levels and workload templates, form the core of business services and are readily visible to users. The following sections introduce these key components:

1.3.1 Zones and Host Groups

Cloud Manager defines a PlateSpin Orchestrate Server and its managed resources as a zone. Within a zone, hosts are organized into host groups, as shown in the following illustration.

A host group serves both technical and business purposes:

  • Defines a collection of hosts with the same computing capacity and performance. When a workload is deployed, it is assigned to the host group and deployed to any of the member hosts. It should be able to run equally well on all hosts.

  • Identifies the costs associated with the host resources (CPUs, memory, storage, and networks). The cost of running a workload in the host group is determined by the amount of resources required by the workload.

As an example, you might form a Business Critical host group that consists of high-performance hosts intended for critical production workloads. At the same time, you might have a Lab host group that consists of standard-performance hosts intended for non-production workloads. The cost of the Business Critical host group’s resources could be greater than the cost of the Lab host group’s resources, reflecting the difference in the computing capacity and performance.

You should be aware of the following considerations when organizing host groups:

  • A host group can include standalone hosts and clusters.

  • All members of a host group must reside in the same zone as the group. For example, if Host Group A is in Zone 1, Host Group A can only include hosts located in Zone 1.

  • All hosts in a group must be identical in terms of hypervisor technology and version, operating system version, network configuration, storage repository configuration, and hardware capabilities. This enables a workload to run on any of the group’s hosts.

  • All hosts that share the same repository must belong to the same host group. In other words, two different host groups cannot include hosts that share the same repository.

  • VMware host group can contain hosts from one vCenter Server only. Including hosts from multiple vCenter Servers in the same host group is not supported.

1.3.2 Service Levels

When a user creates a business service workload, he or she selects a level of service for the workload. The service level determines:

  • The host group in which the workload runs.

  • Objectives related to performance characteristics such as availability, throughput, frequency, response time, and quality.

Consider the following service levels:

The Platinum service level runs workloads in the Business Critical host group and sets service objectives of 99% availability and 2 hour response time for support issues. The other two levels provide slightly lower service for the workloads.

As with host groups, you assign a cost to service level objectives. By varying the objective costs, along with the host group costs, you can establish a cost structure appropriate for the levels of service being provided.

1.3.3 Workload Templates

When a user creates a business service workload, he or she selects from a catalog of predefined workload templates. A workload template defines the following:

  • The VM template used to create the workload.

  • Resource customizations to apply to the workload. For example, if the VM template provides 2 CPUs, you can increase that number to 4 CPUs. You can lock the resources so that users can’t change them, or you can keep them unlocked to allow user customizations.

  • The license costs associated with the VM template software.

You create a catalog of workload templates from which users can choose when requesting business services. Depending on the needs of your users, you might have many workload templates. The examples in the following illustration are based on workload operating system, but you might have workload templates that provide not only the operating system but also applications or other services.

1.3.4 Business Groups

Users are organized into business groups. A business group defines the service levels and workload templates that are available to members of the group. It also defines the group member who is the sponsor for the group. The sponsor is responsible for financial approval of business services requested by the group’s members.