Virtual machine recipe

One of the most important goals of Netcool Agile Service Manager is to support the assurance and provisioning of modern IT, network and storage environments. These environments all make extensive use of increasingly nested virtualization technologies that need to be modeled. The following recipe introduces such an IT Virtualization scenario, and describes an OpenStack response that provides a solution.

IT Virtualization

The Netcool Agile Service Manager model of a nested virtualization scenario can extend the traditional types of models provided by other solutions.

This model can represent a multi-domain view of the world that links IT, network, storage, applications and services. In addition, it can incorporate concepts such as OpenStack's Heat Orchestration and Slack collaboration relative to traditional IT resources.

Some of the benefits of this approach are:

To provide additional context

Increasingly, teams are more multi-disciplined and no longer operate in informational or functional silos. For example, network teams may include IT Virtualization specialists.

Such teams need access to additional context when needed in order to answer some of their business-critical questions, such as:

What storage volume is a VM attached to?
Which orchestration step realized a network port?
Who collaborated with whom for a particular incident?
Which applications and services are supported by a network subnet?
Which VM instances were shutdown as part of a scale-in activity 1 hour ago?
What is the impact of removing a given Hypervisor from the environment?
Which fixed IP addresses have a floating IP address been bound to in the last week?

To provide a data-rich base

Value-added services can be bolted onto a base system, provided the information exists, and the system has an architecture that allows for rapid extension.

For example, when building analytics on the topology data, the availability of information such as seasonality can provide additional insights.

The following diagram depicts the nested layers of virtualization, including networking, between these layers and technologies such as Docker and LXC or LXD.

Note: The services exposed can be applications or appear to be traditionally physical services such as network routers, switches, firewalls and load balancers (a key goal of NFV).

OpenStack

OpenStack is a free and open-source platform for cloud computing, typically deployed as an IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) capability. The software platform consists of interrelated components that control diverse, multi-vendor hardware pools of processing, storage, and network resources throughout and between data centers.

OpenStack provides a number of projects, and related services and APIs, that are summarized here, as they speak directly to the need to have a multi-domain view of the environment. For more information, see the OpenStack project navigator and documentation at the following location: https://www.openstack.org/software/project-navigator/

OpenStack core services include the following:

Nova: Compute manages the lifecycle of compute instances in an OpenStack environment.
Neutron: Networking enables network connectivity as a service for other OpenStack services.
Swift: Object Storage stores and retrieves arbitrarily unstructured data via a REST API.
Cinder: Block Storage provides persistent storage to running instances.
Keystone: Identity provides authentication and authorization services to OpenStack services and a service catalog.
Glance: Image Service stores and retrieves virtual machine disk images for use by Nova.

OpenStack optional services include the following:

Horizon: dashboarding
Ceilometer: telemetry
Heat: orchestration
Sahara: Elastic Map Reduce
Designate: DNS
Barbican: Key Management

Netcool Agile Service Manager provides an Observer that makes extensive use of OpenStack's core and Heat APIs to build an end-to-end (or multi-domain) model.