BMO Financial Group relies on a configuration management database (CMDB) to track and manage all configuration items — both physical and virtual — that support business-critical services. This visibility improves IT service management and provides important data for identifying trends and conducting quantitative analysis for continual service improvement efforts.
The CMDB in a Virtualized World
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BMO Financial Group relies on a configuration management database (CMDB) to track and manage all configuration items - both physical and virtual - that support business-critical services. This visibility improves IT service management and provides important data for identifying trends and conducting quantitative analysis for continual service improvement efforts.
By David Chiu
2Th t BMO Financial Group, a highly to other assets, or CIs, in the CMDB. But e CM diversified financial services pro- how do you handle the relationships of DB vider, we offer clients a broad a virtual server, one that you can't actually in rAange of personal, commercial, corporate, see or touch? a V and institutional financial services across irtu Canada and in the United States. Our clients The answer is:"It doesn't matter." Regardless al expect these financial services to be available of whether an asset is virtual or physical, the ized when they need them, 24x7. information we capture helps describe how W each asset supports the business services orl To help us successfully manage the complex and business systems that matter most to us. d IT infrastructure that supports these critical Understanding these relationships enables financial services, we employ IT Infrastructure us to create service models that map all ®Library (ITIL ) best practices as a framework. the key components supporting our critical In addition, we have implemented a configu- business services. This understanding is ration management database (CMDB) to enable fundamental to adopting a business service us to track configuration items (CIs) and their management (BSM) approach - managing relationships and dependencies, including IT from a business perspective. And a BSM how they interact with established processes. approach is crucial for successfully managing In ITIL, a CI is any component - hardware, business-critical applications, regardless software, people, document, or process - of whether they are running on physical or required to deliver a business service. virtual servers.
Initially, we used the CMDB to track and Virtualization amplifies the need for rigorous manage the relationships of physical assets. processes and clear visibility into how physical When we started our virtualization initiative, servers are partitioned into logical servers.we extended our IT service model to repre-sent virtual assets and their relationships to ITIL defines a business service as some-physical assets, and we started to put virtual thing recognized and consumed by an end assets and their relationships into the CMDB. user. Banking examples include online This is important because we've embraced banking, personal lending, and ATM cash server virtualization as a business strategy, withdrawal. These services are supported and we have a multiyear project in place by business systems that are comprised of to virtualize as many servers as possible. hardware, software, databases, and so on. In fact, we are already running business- Multiple business systems might support critical applications on virtualized servers. a single business service.
Managing the Relationship Because we have captured the relationships of CIs to Business Services among our critical business systems and ser-You can see and touch physical servers vices and all relevant CIs - both physical stacked in your server room so it's easy and virtual - in our CMDB, we know imme-to track them, along with their relationships diately what business service is affected if
3a CI is at risk of failing. For example, if a Change collision also can occur, where two virtual server is approaching capacity, we or more change requests are scheduled for know whether it's supporting one of our the same time on two separate virtual servers critical banking applications or a noncritical running on the same physical server. In some support application. If it's a support applica- cases, you may be able to make the changes tion, we still want to keep it up and running, without any issue. However, consider this but it's not as urgent as a customer-facing scenario: You need to make a change to banking service that customers need and application A which runs on virtual server 1. expect to be available 24x7. However, another change - to application B, which runs on virtu... [download for more]
