3.1 Service Definition – Virtual Data Center Service
Currently this service is sold on a “per server (blade)” basis. A customer contracts for a certain number of servers and receives role-based and locked-down access to the shared VMware vCenter Server® system to manage their servers. Storage can be provided through dedicated arrays, but it is more common for service consumers to receive a percentage of shared storage (dedicated LUN) from a shared array. Firewalls and load balancers are provided from the providers’ shared platforms, but all changes must be undertaken by operational staff on receipt of a change request from a consumer.
Next-generation models will need to increasingly support hybrid capabilities. Link the virtual data center environment to a customer’s “on-premises” VMware environment, enabling easy migration of virtual machines and the addition of new services in future releases.
In addition, a consumer must be able to manage all their resources in one place, while the provider continues to assist with capacity management, infrastructure, and hypervisor support, and creates new value-added services, such as disaster recovery, backup and archive, network, firewalls, and so on, on a per-component basis.
The virtual data center based solutions are a low margin product for the provider, so make every effort to verify that the operational team can work in as effective a manner as possible to keep management work effort low. This can be achieved through the increasing use of automation, orchestration, and self-service, while maintaining the consumer’s high level of flexibility.
The provider’s next-generation virtual data center service has the following key requirements:
• Multitenant hardware (compute and storage).
• Containers of guaranteed compute resources.
• Compute (CPU and RAM) must be provided as a virtual resource pool, with no direct link to physical servers, and scalable in smaller increments allowing consumers to order RAM in 10 GB increments, and vCPU in multiples of 2.
• Storage (tiers) must also be provided by pools.
• Retain the option for a “per blade” solution per customer. This should be the exception, not the norm.
• Retain the option for the provider to decide whether to share the resource pools across blades, or to assign certain customers to specific hardware.
• Ability to move the resource pools around the platform to perform tasks such as maintenance or migration.
• Consumers can create all of their VMs.
• Access to a template library (provider catalog) of available images.
• Consumers can create their own template and images, for example, to support an application running on a new operating system.
• Automation is required to create virtual pools of resources per customer, driven by the provider, as well as set up VLANs, networks (firewalls, switching, load balancing, IP addressing, and so on), and any images needed. There should be minimal manual effort required on the part of the provider to implement these services.
• Provide customers the ability to self-service firewall and load balancer changes, as well as create and remove networks. (Ideally provide in phase 1.)
• The provider must be able to manage capacity across the platform (both shared and dedicated) to manage the infrastructure and address any performance concerns.
• Ability to bill customers for VMware resource usage based on what they consume, as the cost will vary based on the number and size of virtual machines each customer installs.
• Ability to offer operating system licensing as an option (Windows and Red Hat Linux) in case the customers do not want to use their own.
• Burst capability must be an option on a virtual data center resource pool.
• Self-service can be API or GUI-based (with feature parity between the two options), and role-based (so customers can have some read-only users, for example, and other users limited to changing only certain environments).
• Portal access must be through a link (ideally with SSO) from the providers’ existing online portal.
• All changes on the portal must be logged and be visible to the provider.
• Within an environment, consumers can use their own host names for their virtual machines.
• Support for snapshot-based backup.
Figure 1. Virtual Data Center Service Conceptual Design
