Overview of Dell AIM Integration with Microsoft System Center 2012 A Dell Technical White Paper Dell Sridhar Chakravarthy Karthik Sethuramalingam
THIS WHITE PAPER IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, AND MAY CONTAIN TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS AND TECHNICAL INACCURACIES. THE CONTENT IS PROVIDED AS IS, WITHOUT EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND. 2011 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this material in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of Dell Inc. is strictly forbidden. For more information, contact Dell. Dell, the DELL logo, and the DELL badge are trademarks of Dell Inc. Microsoft, Windows, Windows Server, and System Center 2012 are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Other trademarks and trade names may be used in this document to refer to either the entities claiming the marks and names or their products. Dell Inc. disclaims any proprietary interest in trademarks and trade names other than its own. May 2012 Page ii
Contents Introduction... 2 AIM Overview... 2 System Center Orchestrator Overview... 2 Integration Pack... 2 Overview of Integration Pack Activity... 3 Workflow for Adding Network Connection to Persona... 5 Creating a Network Connection for a Persona... 5 Sample Workflows in the Integration Pack... 8 Proactive Failover Workflow... 8 P2V and V2V Workflow... 8 References... 8 Tables Table 1. Overview of Integration Pack Activities... 4 Figures Figure 1. Integration Pack Architecture... 3 Figure 2. Create Network Connection Configuration... 5 Figure 3. Create Persona... 6 Figure 4. Create Network Object... 7 Figure 5. Create Network Connection... 7 Figure 6. Complete Workflow... 8 Page 1
Introduction This white paper provides an overview of the Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager (AIM) Integration Pack for Microsoft System Center Opalis. The specific activities provided by this integration pack along with a sample use case are discussed. AIM Overview Dell (AIM) is a software solution designed to help build a next generation datacenter. Dell AIM provides rapid workload mobility and recovery management across physical and virtual machines in the heterogeneous datacenter. Dell AIM lets you move workloads and repurpose servers in minutes, and dynamically controls not only which workloads run on a server, but also each server s associated network (LAN/WAN) connectivity, storage (SAN/NAS) access, and power state. The result is a dynamic and flexible data center infrastructure that completes technology migration and consolidation projects quickly instead of waiting for days, weeks or months unifies and manages your infrastructure as a single pool, and lets you scale infrastructure capacity up or down based on business needs and/or power footprint improves business continuity and recovery management with AIM s fast response and workload mobility simplifies test and development operations, thus minimizing the time to build and reconfigure the testing environment Dell AIM web services provide comprehensive client-side application programming interfaces which allow administrators to perform management operations. The web services use XML-based messaging using the SOAP protocol over an HTTP (or HTTPS) connection between the management application and the Dell AIM Controller. The AIM-System Center integration is based on this web interface. System Center Orchestrator Overview System Center Orchestrator enables the creation of a workflow across systems in a consistent, documented, and compliant mechanism. It integrates System-Center with non-microsoft tools to enable interoperability across the datacenter. Integration Pack The goal of this integration between AIM and Microsoft System Center Orchestrator is to combine the workflow automation capabilities offered by System Center and the infrastructure management capabilities of Dell AIM. Dell AIM and Microsoft System Center 2012 integration essentially exposes the Dell AIM web interfaces as activities in the SC Orchestrator environment. The integration pack itself is based on the SC Orchestrator QIK framework. The integration pack exposes the interfaces as Create, Read, Update, and Delete activities. Page 2
Figure 1. Integration Pack Architecture Figure 1 depicts the overall architecture of the solution where several management entities co-exist in a datacenter. Traditionally, workflow automation would require the administrator to be expert in the various interfaces required by these management entities. These interfaces could be in different languages (e.g. Powershell or Web Services), and have different structures and operational semantics. Creating a workflow would be a specialized task requiring significant development time. In an SC Orchestrator environment, the administrator works with interfaces (activities in SC Opalis) provided by different integration packs (for each management entity). The activity abstractions hide the details of various interfaces from different management consoles and provide the administrator with a uniform view of the associated functionality. The activities associated with different management entities are available in a centralized location in the SC Orchestrator framework and an administrator can deploy a workflow rapidly and diagrammatically. This enables rapid creation and deployment of workflows. Overview of Integration Pack Activity The integration pack has activities listed in Figure 2 that are AIM APIs hooked into the Orchestrator framework. As mentioned earlier, the integration pack activities follow the CRUD pattern in general (Create, Read, Update, Delete). Each activity has a set of inputs, their associated set of filters, and the results that are published on the Orchestrator data bus. The integration pack requires Dell AIM 3.4.1 and SC Orchestrator version 6.3. Page 3
Table 1 summarizes the activities and their associated functionality. The Add-Relationship, Get- Relationship, Add-Object, Update-Object, and Delete-Object activities describe operations on different kinds of objects. The Add Object activity creates various objects like Network, VMRac and Switch, etc. Similarly, the Run Operation activity provides a mechanism to execute any Dell AIM web service interface call. The section below illustrates how these generic activities operate in context of adding a network connection to a persona. Table 1. Overview of Integration Pack Activities Activity Name Add Persona Add Object Add Relationship Get Object Get Persona Get Relationship Maintenance Mode Remove Object Remove Persona Run Operation Start Stop Update Object Update Persona Description The Add Persona activity is used in a policy to add a new Persona to the Dell AIM environment. The Add Object activity is used in a policy to add new objects to the Dell AIM environment such as a Network, Server Pool, or VMRack. The Add Relationship activity is used in a policy to add a new child object to an existing Dell AIM object such as a Network Connection or Image to a Persona. The Get Object activity is used in a policy to retrieve objects of a specified type from the Dell AIM environment such as retrieving all of the Networks, Hosts, or VMRacks. The Get Persona activity is used in a policy to retrieve information about the personas in the Dell AIM environment. The Get Relationship activity is used in a policy to retrieve child objects of a certain type from a specified parent such as the Images assigned to a Persona or the Switches assigned to a Rack. The Maintenance Mode activity is used in a policy to set the maintenance mode of a host, persona, or VMRack. The Remove Object activity is used in a policy to remove an object from the Dell AIM environment such as a Network, Switch, or VMRack. The Remove Persona activity is used in a policy to remove a persona from the Dell AIM environment. The Run Operation activity is used in a policy to invoke an AimWS Method, for example locking a persona to the server it has been assigned to or disabling a network connection. The Start activity is used in a policy to start a persona or VMRack that is currently stopped. The Stop activity is used in a policy to stop persona or VMRack that is currently running. The Update Object activity is used in a policy to update existing objects in the Dell AIM environment, as in changing the Name of a Server Pool. The Update Persona activity is used in a policy to update an existing persona, as in enabling a health monitor and setting a health monitor hostname. Page 4
Workflow for Adding Network Connection to Persona The add relationship activity creates relationships between two objects. For example, it is used to create a relationship between a persona and an associated network object. The activity requires the ID of the parent persona and the ID of the child network object. Apart from creating the connection, the user must specify the value of the attributes related to the network connection. For example while adding a network connection to a persona, the user must specify if the IP address must be obtained via DHCP or be manually assigned. While adding a network connection object to a persona using the generic activity like add relationship, the user must be able to specify configuration parameters related to network connection. In order to achieve this, a context needs to be passed to the Add Relationship activity. This context is created as a configuration of the network connection object type, and is then passed to the Add Relationship activity Creating a Network Connection for a Persona 1. Creating the network connection configuration: The user first creates a network and network connection configuration type. In the example used here, the network configuration is created with the name AIMObject-Network and the network connection configuration name is AIMObject- NetworkConnection. The Integration Pack uses two types of configuration: Dell AIM and Dell AIM Object. The Dell AIM type is used to capture the AIM connection details, and this will be used by non-generic activities like Start/Stop or Add Persona. The Dell AIM Object type also captures the object context (object type) along with AIM connection details, and it can be used by generic activities like Add/Get- Object and Add Relationship. Figure 2. Create Network Connection Configuration Page 5
2. Create persona: The user uses the Add Persona activity to create a persona and configure its parameters. Figure 3. Create Persona 3. Create network: The user uses the add object activity to create a network object named Public- Network. To indicate that the generic add object needs to create a network object, the AIMObject-Network is passed as the configuration to add object. The user creates a workflow connecting add persona to add object. Page 6
Figure 4. Create Network Object 4. Create network connection: The user connects the persona object to the network object via add relationship activity. To indicate that the relationship is of type network connection, AIMObject- NetworkConnection is passed as the configuration to add relationship. Here the parent ID is the persona ID returned by add persona activity and the network ID is the ID of the network returned by add object (Network) activity. Figure 5. Create Network Connection Page 7
5. Complete workflow: Then the user connects add object to add relationship, completing the workflow Figure 6. Complete Workflow Sample Workflows in the Integration Pack The integration pack is pre-packaged with the following two sample workflows. The details of the workflow are present along with the User Guide. Proactive Failover Workflow This workflow showcases the power of the integration pack. It combines the functionality of the Microsoft System Center Operation Manager and Dell AIM to proactively re-target the workloads when a critical failure occurs on physical hardware that is part of Dell AIM environment. The workflow executes various AIM operations as well as logs an event into SCOM to indicate workflow progress. Dell server management pack for SCOM monitors health of Dell servers. It raises critical/warning events in SCOM by talking to Dell Open Manage. When a critical failure event like OMSA Temperature sensor detected a failure value occurs, this workflow gets triggered. The workflow retargets all the workloads from that physical server to another available server. P2V and V2V Workflow The P2V workflow demonstrates re-targeting of persona across physical and virtual machines. This workflow could be triggered to consolidate physical assets, or to scale down to meet load conditions in the environment. The V2V workflow demonstrates AIM capability to operate across hypervisors. References 1. Dell AIM resources 2. SC Orchestrator workflow references Page 8