VMworld's Solution Exchange floor was packed with many vendors covering many aspects of virtualization. As I made my way around the floor talking to these vendors, I was very impressed with what one was doing. I stopped at the booth of DynamicOps and spoke to Rich Bourdeau about what DynamicOps is all about and what they bring to the industry. Rich told me that DynamicOps really enables the "dynamic data center" with a very comprehensive IT service delivery package. The product is built on more than 3 years of real world operational experience, deploying and managing Credit Suisse's global virtual infrastructure that includes more than 15,000 virtual machines. Rich states that, "VRM empowers IT to deliver on-demand computing services while lowering both opertional and capital costs through:
- automated resource reclamation
- capacity planning
- IT resource cost transparency
- support for both virtual desktops and servers
DynamicOps is a company that really strives to help their customers improve their business agility by providing a service-oriented delivery framework that enables compute resources to be allocated and reallocated dynamically based on changing business needs. Their self-service portal and automated service delivery ensure that virtual machines are configured according to predefined specs and processes within allocated resources by authorized individuals. With this kind of framework built, VRM can facilitate capacity planning and efficient resource allocation. Their management capability further reduces support costs as well as limits virtual machine sprawl by identifying rogue, inactive, and obsolete virtual machines.
At the heart of VRM is a standard 'out-of-the-box' process automation workflows built on top of Microsoft's Windows Workflow engine, which is a standard .NET component. VRM provides a developer tool kit which allows customers to call DynamicOps services from their application via their web services interface, or have VRM integrate with existing management products and CMDBs using a plug-in SDK. DynamicOps uses this plug-in SDK to develop and deliver out-of-the-box plug-ins for Citrix XenDesktop, VMware View and image deployment software from CA, HP, IBM, and yes, even Citrix Provisioning Services. I really liked the ability of customers to be able to fully control VRM's process automation. By using Microsoft's Visual Studio, customers can add and remove tasks to further modify provided workflows. For example, administrators can define custom approval workflows or choose specific deployment workflows for Windows or Linux.
The virtualization management arena is crowded and everyone doing pretty much the same thing. What I did like about DynamicOps product
Virtual Resource Manager
is that it's easy to install, configure, and discover a customer environment to really start showing value by creating management policies to get a handle on a virtual infrastructure. What I really liked about the product was their:
- Deployment planning worksheets. DynamicOps really assists customers in planning how they are going to organize, set policies, and enable security in their virtual environments.
- Buld registration and Policy. the VRM product provides an infrastructure organizational wizard that enables ownership, group, and policy assignment for existing virtual machines.
- Cost Profile Planner. A real big issue today is quantifying the costs associated with virtualization. VRM's cost profile planner generates a "fully loaded" cost for server and storage (purchase price, maintenance administration, power, space, cooling, etc) based on industry averages.
I see VRM helping companies achieve flexibility and efficiency in their infrastructures by:
- increasing operational efficiency
- optimizing resource utilization
- accelerating virtualization deployment
Most beneficial here I think is the increasing operational efficiency and optimizing resource utilization. From the operational efficiency perspective, most companies spend between 4-8 man hours spread over 2-3 days to provision a new machine and make it usable. VRM automates that process by eliminating manual effort of highly skilled resources while accelerating service delivery. Speaking around optimizing resource utilization, one big concern is the issue of virtual machine sprawl. This is one of the biggest concerns facing companies today that have deployed virtualization technologies. With VRM's policies, customers can reduce over-provisioning and creation of unauthorized VMs, automate the reuse of machines needed for temporary purposes, and automate the recycling of inactive and abandoned VMs.
If you are looking for a product to cross hypervisor platforms, integrate with other management ecosystems, and provide true IT resource cost transparency, besides just chargeback reporting, take a closer look at DynamicOps' Virtual Resource Manager.
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