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Cloud Orchestration: What It Is, Why You Need It

The cloud is going to arrive in bits and pieces, not in a large uprooting of environments. When I try to explain that to some customers, they automatically change the conversation because they are not interested in cloud. Some of them view the cloud as a threat or they simply don't understand it.

The irony comes when some of them change the conversation and they want to discuss orchestration. (VMware vCenter Orchestrator and Microsoft System Center Orchestrator are examples, and are both great orchestration products.) I can't help but smile at that point because they are going down the path of a private cloud without realizing it.

Orchestration is at the heart of the private cloud. It's the tool that you will use to automate repetitive tasks that you do daily or weekly. When designing your private cloud, orchestrators are what you will need to tie in with your ticketing system so that you can automate user requests.

Your private cloud might be designed so that when a user needs a new server, he fills in a service request from the service request portal. That service request will then require one or more approvals and once approved it is then passed on to orchestrator for execution at the different levels of systems within your private cloud.

If you were building your private cloud around Microsoft technologies, Orchestrator would receive the approved service request from System Center Service Manager and execute the automation in System Center Virtual Machine manager, thereby completely automating what is otherwise a manual process of right clicking and deploying a VM from scratch or template.

It is imperative to realize that orchestration is a fundamental building block of your private cloud and while today you may only be interested in automating repetitive, boring tasks, you should recognize that you are almost half way there from a cloud perspective. What is left is integration with ticketing and change management systems, monitoring and some other components.

What admins need to understand is that the private cloud is not just about them anymore, and that they are building a framework that has built in accountability, change management, ITIL best practices, chargebacks or showbacks, etc.

I encourage you, if you have not started working with an orchestration tool, to start doing so. Once you start down the orchestration path, you are well on your way to a much more robust environment that is more agile and responds to customer needs much faster. If you have automated VM provisioning and have built the right templates, you are then simply approving requests. Imagine how much time you now have on your hands to do other things that are more exciting and important to the business, like building showback models.

Stopping at a highly virtualized environment is not good enough anymore and getting pre-occupied in whether vSphere or Hyper-V is better is also a waste of time and a very old school mindset that will not save you money and that will keep you isolated.

VMware and Microsoft both have provisions to manage one another's hypervisor. Your job now is to build the framework to automate repetitive tasks in a trackable way so that you have time to execute other projects.

I am very interested to know how many of you are working with an orchestration tool or are looking to start working with one. Share your comments here.

Posted by Elias Khnaser on 01/23/2013 at 5:21 PM


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Reader Comments:

Wed, Jan 30, 2013 Elias Khnaser Chicago, IL

@Brian Process automation is crucial and is the essense of a Private Cloud, but not everyone is ready to undergo that task, as you said that is a huge task and depending on the size of the organization can be multiple FTEs. However, i don't agree with you that Orchestration is redundant, overkill etc.... you are still looking at Orchestration as a means to make your hob easier, i am saying it is not about you anymore, you have lost control and whether you admit this now or in 10 years your consumer is now in control and you have to comepete with instant access to services from Amazon, Azure and others. I have organization crippled under the pressure that Marketing departments are putting on them. Marketing will go out and use a CC and get access to VMs on the Amazon cloud and run their campaigns, when done, they leave these VMs without proper disposal or data. IT is forced to introduce self-service portals that can quickly provision VMs. Integration is crucial as it tracks the requests, goes through the necessary approvals, executes the tasks, TRACKS the VM to avoid VM sprawl, so lifecycle management is important, destroys the VM when not needed, monitors the VM. To think that you can live in an isolated world where you are creating PowerShell scripst to automate your workload without delivering a service that is consumable by your customers is very "passe" and whether you realize this at your current job or your next, it is coming. Process automation is huge, but orchestrating and automating repetitve, redundant and time consuming processes like creating a VM and tracking its lifecycle is a huge plus.

Tue, Jan 29, 2013 Brian Donoho New York

Opalis user since Oct 2010. In the process of upgrading to System Center Orchestrator 2012 SP1. Personally, automated server rollout is the last thing on my mind. Although the capabilities are technically there (and have been for a while), it's not been my experience that private clouds leave resource unused for automated server creation. Ticket integration sounds great on paper, but no stand alone ticketing system worth its salt doesn't already have all the features necessary to function efficiently out of the box, including audit trails. Orchestration integration is unnecessary, redundant and overkill. That said, process orchestration, is huge (multiple full time jobs huge) and can tie together every facet of an organization, not only automating processes, but at a larger scale reducing redundant processes. Also keep in mind that while orchestration can be the oil and/or glue in an organization, PowerShell will increasingly be the oil and/or glue of any orchestration solution.

Thu, Jan 24, 2013 Mohamed Roushdy Egypt, Cairo

Hello Mr.Elias, Im somehow new to Virtualization world, I've learned VMware VCP 4.0 from your video tutorials, and im using VMware products right now (ESX4.1 & ESXi5). And I know nothing about the orchestrator and what it can do for me, But i will search for details about that tool.

Thu, Jan 24, 2013 george knox London,New York

Hi, another shameless plug. Our company has a software product ( Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator) that does what it says on the tin. Only difference we are not tied to a single Hypervisor technology. We orchestrate from a single pane of glass Vmware,Xen,Hyper V, KVM all the storage,compute and network processes. The world is hetrogeneous and your Orchestration layer needs to be as well www.flexiant.com George Knox CEO

Wed, Jan 23, 2013 Paul

It's quite funny you bring this up. I have been talking with my IT director that I really need to try and start with orchestration tool, but I'm shy to jump in with how much time it will take to learn it. I've also talked with my peers about making it easy for them to create VMs by portal without having to bug the system guys to please spin up another server. Eventually we want to create PaaS for our internal guys to support their apps to our customers, but we're also starting to move into PaaS for our direct customers to run their own apps or get vendors to help them support their own apps. FYI these are all internal organization customers. We're deploying the rest of our VDI, and we want to get to the user requesting a desktop and see exactly how much they will pay to have that full blown office on their desktop. This is all probably a couple years in the making, but I really would like to dive into it to start trying something.

Wed, Jan 23, 2013 Elias Khnaser Chicago, IL

shameless plug :) i am about to publish The Microsoft Priavte Cloud based around exam 70-247 which has 4 lessons dedicated to integration of SCO with VMM, SCSM, SCOM, DPM etc... check it out at www.trainsignal.com

Wed, Jan 23, 2013 sanjai

Hi, Orchestrator (MS / VMware) seems to be powerful also I'm currently undergoing training on SC2012 suite of products. The difficult part is to integrate with other products (eg:- MS Orchestrator with SCSM or SCOM or SCVMM)

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