Dynamic Data Center Toolkit Coming To An Enterprise Near You
Hello. My name is Luis Camara Manoel. I am a Group Program Manager in the Microsoft’s Solution Accelerators team. I would like to introduce the upcoming Dynamic Infrastructure Toolkit for System Center (DIT-SC) which my team is building, and show you how it benefits Enterprise customers and Systems Integrators. This is the first of a series of blog posts. In my next post, I’ll tell you how Technology Partners can plug in and leverage it in their own product offerings.
Why Should You Care?
Simply because DIT-SC is built to extend what our Technology Partners and Systems Integrators do best; build first class data centers while we give business unit IT managers the flexibility and control they crave to manage their own ever-changing environments.
So What Is DIT-SC?
In a nutshell, think of it as a set of FREE tools to enable data centers to dynamically pool, allocate and manage resources to enable IT infrastructure as a service. To be clearer, there two main component areas:
1. Guidance: To help SIs and Enterprise assess IT infrastructure readiness to build a dynamic data center. We’ll help them plan, deliver, operate, and manage the infrastructure they need to support the dynamic data center.
2. Automation
a) Portals for on-boarding a new organization and infrastructure request, managing a virtual environment, and accessing reports.
b) A light-weight provisioning engine designed to be extensible to leverage our technology partners’ products.
c) A SQL DB where we store information about the users, their environments, and the technologies they use in their infrastructure, etc.
Under The Hood
In building DIT-SC, we are integrating Microsoft’s latest and greatest technologies in Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V R2, and SCVMM 2008 R2.
How Would An Enterprise Customer Use DIT-SC?
A common scenario could include a business unit IT manager (BUIT) that needs an application to be built, so he goes to a portal where he captures the IT requirements for this new workload. These requirements may include compute, storage, and network assets, as well as specific VM profiles they wish to use. The data center administrator (DC Admin) then gets notified of the request, checks for the availability of resources in the data center, and assigns them to the requested workload. Once ready, the request is approved and the BUIT can access a self-service portal, where he can now take full control of the environment he custom built for his workload. Here he can create VMs, start them, stop them, delete them, etc. etc. etc. as well as access valuable reports regarding his application.
To summarize:
1. BUIT on-boards application capturing requirements for workload.
2. DC Admin assigns appropriate compute, network and storage resources.
3. BUIT accesses Self-Service Portal where he has full control of the environment.
4. BUIT accesses reports regarding his workloads, costs etc.
How Would A Systems Integrator Use DIT-SC?
SIs can approach their accounts to help them assess their infrastructure readiness before deploying the DIT-SC. For this purpose we are providing SIs with fabric readiness guidance that describes the infrastructure they need. Another gem in this toolkit is our Microsoft Assessment and Planning tool, which SI’s can use to automatically, and without the help of local agents, discover and inventory enterprise assets, and generate proposals for the deployment of DIT-SC. And did I mention, both DIT-SC and MAP are free?
Look out for my next post about the great opportunities DIT-SC presents for our Hardware partners, as well as its extensibility story.
Stay tuned!
Luis Camara Manoel