vCloud Director orchestrated infrastructure provisioning featuring VCE UIM vCO plug-in preview
VCE, the company formed by Cisco and EMC with investments from VMware and Intel is showing a demonstration of their vCenter Orchestrator powered infrastructure provisioning for vCloud Director. This is done with using EMC Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM) which is the single pane of glass managing the stand alone Vblock Element Management applications.
If you followed the vCenter Orchestrator plug-in releases you must have noticed the UCS Manager release. So, how is a UIM plug-in different ? It covers some of the functionality in the UCS Manager plug-in but also Cisco MCS and Nexus, EMC Unisphere & SMC and some vCenter functionality. The advantage of orchestrating the top management application is that all the integration between the different parts is already included and can be automated from vCO. The exception is for vCloud Director which is orchestrated directly from vCO vCloud Director Plug-in. This integration is done by a demo workflow provided with the UIM plug-in by the VCE folks and has the following steps:
- Instantiate a Service from a UIM service offering using Vblock resources
- Reserve and activate the service from the Service offering
- Synchronize vCenter with the service
- Add a provider Virtual Data Center to vCloud Director
As a result the vCloud Director administrator get additional resources he can allocate to be consumed by the different organizations Virtual Data Centers.
The UIM plug-in exposes an inventory listing:
- Service offerings
- Services
- tasks
- vBlocks
- vCenters
- vCenter Clusters
Watch the full workflow demonstration video here:
