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Dynamic Data Center Toolkit for the Enterprise – Extensibility Story, and Opportunities for Hardware Partners

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In my previous post I introduced our upcoming Dynamic Infrastructure Toolkit for System Center (DIT-SC) and the benefits it offers Enterprise customers and System Integrators. Today I would like to reveal some of the opportunities the DIT-SC presents for our Hardware Partners.

The DIT-SC is designed to extend the most common VM provisioning actions to take advantage of hardware specific functionality, and to assign existing datacenter infrastructure resource pools to a requested workload. To this end, we have been working closely with some of the leading hardware manufacturers to enable their unique functionality through hardware-specific PowerShell commandlets.

Extensibility - VM Provisioning Actions

Consider the simple action of creating a VM. When taking advantage of rapid-provisioning features as provided in a SAN-enabled environment, a number of customized tasks must be performed prior to, and after the actual creation of the VM as defined by SCVMM, such as creating a LUN, assigning a LUN, etc. These tasks are captured in an administrator-configured XML file which, at runtime, executes the default and partner-specific tasks in their proper sequence to enable the advanced hardware features. Think of what this means for your data center assets: the seamless enablement of the unique, high-powered, differentiating features, you have come to appreciate in your hardware.

The Opportunity - What does this mean for our Hardware Partners?

For our Hardware Partners the story is simple. PowerShell-enabled technologies can be leveraged and automated via DIT-SC‘s extensibility. We are asking our partners to identify and validate the atomic-level tasks that need to be executed in order to perform the most common provisioning actions. We then work closely with these partners to perform as much parallel validation as possible. Once these PS scripts are validated, our customers are provided with a link to a Hardware Partner’s script, which they can download and leverage in a DIT-SC driven environment. Stay tuned! There is more to come.

Luis Camara Manoel is Group Program Manager in the Microsoft’s Solution Accelerators team.