IBM® Tivoli® Service Automation Manager (TSAM) has delivered a new extension to configure extra disks in addition to the boot disk when requesting virtual machines within a Project with VMWare servers. Downloading the installation package from the Integrated Service Management Library and installing it on top of TSAM 7.2.2 platform enables the cloud administrator to prepare and manage a multi-tenant, customer-segregated environment for hosting the additional disks. In particular, the cloud administrator can select the VMWare data stores that he wants to use for additional disks grouping them in TSAM storage pools that can be then associated with one or more customers (*), meaning that only those customers can carve storage from the data stores. She can also limit the amount of storage that each customer can use on a TSAM storage pool. Finally, the cloud administrator can flag this type of TSAM storage pool to be thin provisioned.
Once the cloud administrator has prepared the environment, then the users of the cloud can request virtual machines equipped with extra disks – in addition to the boot disk, taken from one of the TSAM storage pools they are authorized to. The extension automatically formats and attaches the disks to the virtual machines, so when the users log in they can start working.
The life-cycle of the extra disks is tied to the life-cycle of the virtual machine to avoid any inconsistency of data, which means that they are saved, restored, and deleted together with the boot disk.
The Extension for Additional Disk has some gaps that should be filled in one of next releases: the users cannot expand extra disks and cannot modify the configuration of a virtual machine to attach or detach extra disks.
(*) This article focuses on a public
cloud solution, where the service provider sells services to his customers. The cloud administrator is the administrator of the entire cloud platform.