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The Management Burden in Virtual Environments
Virtual machines are becoming mainstream technology for consolidating and adding servers to the IT infrastructure. Virtualization technology allows companies to maximize resources and save on hardware expenditure. Many companies believe that it will also reduce staffing levels and lower support costs, but this is not always the case. Virtualization adds additional layers of overhead and complexity, so cost savings in hardware are often offset by the increase in time and staff that are required to manage these environments.
IT support staff spend most of their time performing activities like change requests, problem analysis and resolution. In a virtual environment the burden of administrating and maintaining machines increases. Manually coordinating systems for maintenance procedures, change management and problem management on multiple machines quickly becomes a strategy that doesn't scale. To make these systems truly cost effective IT departments need to automate run book procedures so IT staff spend less time on routine, repetitive tasks.
Automate Virtual Management Tasks Into Best Practices
Opalis Software is the expert provider of Run Book Automation software that enables organizations to integrate, orchestrate and automate IT processes. With Opalis companies report improved service delivery, service levels, and a reduction in operational costs. This is achieved by automating manual tasks and operational processes into standardized, documented, and reliable best practices.
Opalis helps customers implement best practice frameworks, such as ITIL, by bridging the gap between department, application and data silos and integrating the people, processes and technology involved in operational tasks. The flexible workflow architecture provides an easy way to remove repetitive, time-consuming, manual tasks from overburdened IT staff so they can be reallocated to strategic projects.
Opalis ships with out-of-the-box integration to leading data center management tools, making the automation of processes Simple, Fast, and Effective. Opalis automates run book procedures without custom programming, professional services, or rip and replace methods, which means IT shops can quickly realize the benefits of automating best practices.
Maintenance Procedures
Good maintenance procedures are a key component in service availability. However, most IT departments perform duties manually which limits the frequency and number of tasks that can be completed within the maintenance window. This introduces the risk of error, inconsistency, and can impact service availability. In most cases schedules and knowledge of system dependencies live inside the minds of a few IT staff, with little to no reporting. Even companies with well documented policies are faced with time constraints which result in corporate policies being bypassed.
Opalis provides a script-free workflow environment to orchestrate, integrate and automate even the most complex backup procedures.
- Automate image archiving, snapshot, backup process
- Test restoration processes
- Pause monitoring systems during maintenance hours
- Generate service desk tickets and update status during each step in the process
This Backup Procedure shows two Opalis Policies, one that runs nightly and one that runs weekly. The nightly backup process (top Policy) initiates a VMware snapshot of the virtual machine, once complete it moves the snapshot to an archive location and initiates VERITAS Backup.
The weekly branch suspends the VMware machine and initiates VERITAS to run a backup on the entire virtual machine. Once complete the VMware machine is returned to an online state. If either Policy fails, a BMC Remedy Case will be created and populated with details of the failure: which step failed, time, error returned, exit codes, etc..
Change Management
Change management is the addition, modification or removal of any component in an IT environment. Change requests can result from users requesting software, modifications to corporate security policies or in response to a problem that requires a change in system configuration such as a patch.
Industry analysts report that up to 80% of IT-related problems are directly attributable to changes made to the environment. The rapid adoption of virtual servers is helping IT departments fulfill change requests faster, by provisioning new virtual machines instead of building physical boxes from scratch. But whether physical or virtual, best practices need to be defined and automated to prevent unanticipated downtime and service delivery delays.
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