Is VMUnify just a provisioning solution?

Posted by Giridhar LV in

 Infrastructure Management

Feb 8, 2012 | Total views: 136

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Giridhar LV
General Manager - R&D Services
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When talking to some of our prospects, one of the common questions that they ask us is whether VMUnify is just a provisioning solution.

To answer this, I thought I will talk a little bit about what goes into provisioning and what VMUnify does.

In its most basic form, provisioning involves creating a new Virtual Machine from a template, called the Golden Image. There are APIs available from VMware, Microsoft and Citrix that can enable this with just one method call, so what can be so difficult about creating a provisioning solution? Well, this approach would just suffice if one or more of the following statements are true:

1. There is only one hypervisor in the organization
2. There are multiple hypervisors, each with an infinite supply of compute, network and storage resources
3. There is only one Virtualization Admin
4. Virtualization Admin is an expert to handle all Operating Systems, Network, Storage and AD/LDAP Administration
5. Everybody in the organization is a Virtualization Admin

In my opinion, the chances of one or more of the above statements being true are far-off.

Let’s look at some typical scenarios of Virtualized environments:

1. In a Dev/ Test setup with multiple hypervisors, you want to be able to provision multiple VMs, multiple flavors of VMs, maybe seek approvals for provisioning.
2. In a Virtualization environment with multiple hypervisors, a decision needs to be taken dynamically on where a VM needs to be placed after provisioning.
3. In a production environment, a VM may need to be added to a Work Group or a Domain; the user associated with the VM may need to be added to the VM.
4. A Virtualized environment where the end user has the ability to choose the VM he wants to be created, and he/she also has the ability to customize the CPU, Storage, Networking and RAM configuration.
5. A Virtualized environment where the end user using the VM, pays for the usage.
6. A Virtualized environment that has a mixed set of hypervisors from different vendors.
7. Provide email intimation to users and admin on specific events like provisioning succeeding or failing, etc.

So, there exists a huge gap between the ability to just call the provisioning API and addressing the provisioning scenarios listed above and this is where VMUnify fits in.

VMUnify provides an intelligent provisioning system that provides IT administrators to manage a multi-vendor hypervisor environment and  provide their users the ability to choose from a list of golden images, configure the VM, seek approval for the usage of the VM, get email notifications, push and execute software in the VMs, etc.

For more information, visit us at www.vmunify.mindtree.com or reach us on vmUnify@mindtree.com.