As the CTO of newScale, I have the benefit of meeting with many customers and prospects. Recently, I've been talking to VMWare administrators, Server managers about their challenges as they introduce virtualization in the enterprise. They all seem to face a core set of common issues, which despite the different sizes of the organizations, were remarkably coherent.
For example, a small company may not need self-service for their users to request servers, but they need a system of record to capture the workloads, SLA's, configurations, and change process. For example, one said "I wish someone had documented that server can only be touched Saturdays between 9 and 11 pm." Or, "I've been here a year, and was wondering why that machine had almost no usage. When I found the user, they said, "That thing? We haven't done anything for a year."
And there were many more stories like that.
This led me to think a short guide to 10 things the server team should know about service catalog and life cycle management might be useful. Over the next few days I'm going to write more extensively about this. Here's my first pass at the ten things VMware admins should know about self-service catalogs and lifecycle management.
1. The service catalog is a tool for communicating offers to your user community. These offers represent the server standards and configurations you want to encourage. Make them easy to find, understand, compare, and order makes them likely to be followed.
2. It's the place where your user can self-configure their request. Rather than argue with the user, you can publish baseline configurations and allowed changes. For example, Large Linux can be configured with 2,4 or 8 Gigs of RAM.
3. The catalog system is more than a document, it's also used to manage the lifecycle of the request. This means that you know what was requested, by whom, for how long, etc. Modern service catalog software actually lets you model all the parameters required to describe a workload, keep a record of them.
4. There's a lot more to setting up environments than just a server, the service catalog provides access to all the other required services such as security, network, storage.
5. The service catalog software can communicate directly with the underlying support systems to orchestrate provisioning workflows, change management processes or any other process that it's needed.
6. The service catalog and lifecycle manager are your best friend to track the "as requested" to "as configured" to as "as built" and "as changed" for the inevitable moment something breaks.
7.There's a lot more to self-service than a web form. When you look at the Dell site, you'll see guidance and configuration wizards. These are important to truly enable self-service.
8. It's safe to offer your services in a catalog as long as there's robust role-based access controls down to the granular level and policies.
9. A service catalog will help you get ready for cloud computing, even a private cloud. How? By separating the offers, tracking and charging from the underlying provisioning system.
10. Providing self-service will not risk job security. The opposite is true. The easier you make it for your customers to do business with you, the more security you have.
I came up with a few more as I was writing these, but I'll save them for another time. Let's see if I have the stamina for 10 days of writing!
By the way, the best way to learn is to try it for free.
Mr. Flores,
Great method to introduce the service catalog.
I initially questioned positioning the service catalog as a tool for the VMware/Server admin. Fortunately, newScale has a solution to the challenge that the admins might try for free. A great way to get all members of the IT team to understand what a service catalog is and why the service catalog is important.
One question. Do you believe the VMware/server admins might influence the purchase of a service catalog product?
I look forward to your next post.
Posted by: benbree | Monday, August 17, 2009 at 09:30 AM