An infrastructure service is a cluster of servers packaged together with the network and storage resources required to enable the cluster. The Unified Infrastructure Manager/Provisioning Center provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for Vblock systems:

This life cycle shows the overview of the service life cycle as it pertains to an infrastructure service. It starts off as a generic template. The catalog displays a list of all templates (offerings). Based on the current need, selecting the proper template (offering) will allow the administrator to create the desired infrastructure service for provisioning.

As mentioned before, Service Offerings is a template. Within the template, there are minimum and maximum allocations that can be used. For example, you can have a template that allows a minimum of two and a maximum of eight blades.

Service Offerings also identifies whether an OS will be installed with the infrastructure service, and if yes, then which OS. It might be a good idea to have duplicates of each service offering, one with and one without an OS, in case the option is needed.

Anyone creating an infrastructure service will be bound to the resource restrictions defined in the service offering.

The following is an example of what a completed service offering may look like. Notice the minimum and maximum in the Servers section. There is also a default number that can be used to minimize infrastructure service creation. This example shows a range of 1-12 servers, with a default of 1. When the infrastructure service is created, there will be one server, and any more servers needed will require a click of the Add button. If four is the normal number of servers, 4 should be the default value:

Service offerings cannot be created until the Blade Pool and Storage Pool objects are graded. The grade can be considered similar to a class of service. The way the pools are graded completely depends on the business requirements for the Vblock system.

The methods of grading are as follows:

• Performance factor: CPU speed or amount of available memory (blades)
• Resource configuration: Half-width versus full-width (blades)
• BU/Customer allocation: Finance group purchased the resource
• Cluster-specific: Granular selection of components for each vCenter cluster

Since this is a virtualized environment, these well-known identifiers need to be configured on each component as the provisioning occurs. The pool should be a unique pool, not overlapping with any other system.

Each pool will be completely consumed before moving on to the next pool. For instance, if you create a pool of 100 addresses for the first UUID pool, that pool will be completely used before moving to the second pool that you create.

For the WWPN and MAC pools, you can create separate pools for A and B sides, allowing easy identification of where the address resides.

All pools are created as global or Vblock-specific pools. This comes into play more when there are multiple Vblock systems managed by one UIM instance.

To recap the service offering, it is just a template. The details of each server and data store can be edited before provisioning. For example, the hostname, IP address, data store name, and so on.

Now let us move to the integration of UCS Manager with VMware vCenter Server.