Release Management for VM Clones with vCO

Last week I was member of a roundtable for designing SAP application delivery. The main things they discussed about were VM templates and their clones. SAP has an own application abstraction layer (ACC - adaptive computing controller) which hosts an API. With this knowledge I designed a little whiteboard workflow with the vCenter Orchestrator as clone intelligence and automation instance for future release management.

release_management_vCO_CJO

As you can see the software delivery application could be every other deployment system (HP Radia, Altiris etc.) with an API for vCO automation. The only decision you have to made is where to store the knowledge about the configurations (VM and application). In my opinion the best way is to keep all entries in the CMDB to allow a real life cycle for the virtual machines. With an EoL flag it´s really easy to purge old releases and keep their original VM template for potential restores.

So with vCO you have the power to adopt all the nice processes in your IT environment!