This chapter contains the following topics:

In this chapter, we discuss the value of integrating an automated storage provisioning solution as part of an end-to-end service management solution. We achieve automated storage provisioning as part of an end-to-end application provisioning solution by using Tivoli Provisioning Manager to deploy the various components of an application and Tivoli Storage Productivity Center to deploy and manage the storage needs for a given business service as part of an integrated workflow. Although we do not show the installation steps for the individual products, we do describe the components and map them to the machines in our environment. In addition, we explain the default parameters and what changes are needed to perform the product integrations.

The products involved in this scenario are as follows:

In this section, we discuss the key benefits of provisioning and storage management solutions and the value an integrated end-to-end business service provisioning solution provides:

End-to-end application provisioning helps to automate IT processes and optimizes resource utilization. This approach can address changing business demands and help meet service-level agreements for key business services.

Many IT organizations today manage their silos of expertise (network, storage, operating system, and application teams) for the key business services of an organization, which can cause many operational challenges. First, deployment errors can result in roll-backs and unplanned down-time of business-critical applications, which can cause business customer dissatisfaction. In addition, siloed operations can cause the inability to ensure that the test environment matches production, which can result in quality problems and slow problem resolution, causing a loss in revenue and productivity. Moreover, this type of operation tends to lead to a lack of an auditable deployment process that hinders the ability to comply with external regulations, which can cause financial penalties or loss of shareholder value. Finally, this type of operation tends to lead to poor asset management which tends to result in “just-in-case” capacity provisioning and minimal amounts of virtualization because of the demand by finance teams for usage reporting and chargeback, which causes low-resource sharing and low-utilization rates and a high cost per asset.

In addition to the challenge of end-to-end application provisioning, storage management has its own set of challenges that can affect the business. Out-of-control storage growth causes the demand for better utilization of existing resources. In addition, as storage grows, the importance of several aspects becomes important: minimizing performance bottlenecks and planning for capacity upgrades, which causes the need for performance analytics with root cause identification and capacity management. Finally, minimizing outages and keeping up with changes made to the storage area network and multivendor storage devices forces organizations to look at tools that can be used for many systems and allow for change and configuration management. Figure 13-1 shows the cost of disks has consistently decreased, however, the quantity of disks needed as exponential grown.

Integrating storage and application provisioning in an end-to-end process eliminates much of the error-prone manual work that is traditionally required to build an application environment. This type of workflow can also reduce the amount of manual communication between IT silos that, in many cases, adds several hours or not weeks to the application building process. Because application, server, and storage teams in many organizations are part of separate team with various expertise, an automated single tool that all teams can use to provision a solution is extremely beneficial.

This section explains the key configuration steps of integrating Tivoli Provisioning Manager and Tivoli Storage Productivity Center. It describes the following information:

Many useful resources can help you implement and deploy the integration between Tivoli Provisioning Manager and Tivoli Storage Productivity Center.

For Tivoli Provisioning Manager to integrate with Tivoli Storage Productivity Center, certain prerequisites and roles are required:

Any role

Any of the following roles:

Perform the following steps to configure Tivoli Storage Productivity Center for this scenario:

In our case, the login is http://tpcprod:16310, where tpcprod is the host name of the computer where Tivoli Storage Productivity Center is installed.

Perform the following steps to configure Tivoli Provisioning Manager security:

In our environment, the WebSphere Application Server administrative console was located at http://tpmprod:9060/admin. In our case, tpmprod was the host name of the provisioning server and we used the default port number of 9060.

Define the Tivoli Storage Productivity Center server in Tivoli Provisioning Manager by running TPC_DefineTPCServer.wkf, the provisioning workflow. You must perform these steps for each Tivoli Storage Productivity Center that you want to add to Tivoli Provisioning Manager.

Figure 13-7 shows defining of the Tivoli Storage Productivity Center server in Tivoli Provisioning Manager by running TPC_DefineTPCServer.wkf, the provisioning workflow.

In this section, we follow the overall end-to-end application provisioning solution and show how storage provisioning fits into an end-to-end solution:

In this scenario, we use Tivoli Provisioning Manager to automate the provisioning of the Trade application. This application is hosted on three machines: AIX, Linux, and Windows. The Windows and Linux machines are built as VMWare ESX guests; the AIX system is built as an LPAR on the IBM Power 570. Storage is provisioned to the AIX LPAR through Tivoli Storage Productivity Center through a San Volume Controller and provisioned on DS4800. Finally, the Trade application is deployed and started. See Figure 13-9.

Based on the physical architecture described here, the complete solution provisions in 12 - 17 minutes. See Figure 13-10.

Prior to provisioning SAN-attached disk volumes we validate that no SAN-attached disks are attached to the system. A quick look into Tivoli Storage Productivity Center shows that there are no SAN volumes to our AIX LPAR. See Figure 13-11 on page 392.

In the figure, the disk is only mapped to an individual mdisk and not connected to any volumes on the right.

In addition, a check of the actual AIX System shows that only internal disks are available on the system. See Figure 13-12.

The provisioning of the environment is started through a web service call from an external application front end. See Figure 13-13.

After the external web application triggers the workflow in Tivoli Provisioning Manager, the end-to-end build process starts. See Figure 13-14 on page 394.

The workflow steps through the individual tasks that are required to build the environment. In addition, it provides details about any errors that occur as the workflow progresses. See Figure 13-15.

Validation of Tivoli Storage Productivity Center shows that a new volume has been created and allocated to our AIX system. See Figure 13-16.

Logging in to the AIX System and looking at the file system configuration also shows a new volume group has been created and a SAN-attached disk has been allocated. See Figure 13-17.

After verifying that the Tivoli Provisioning Manager Integration with Tivoli Storage Productivity Center has successfully completed, we ensure that the end-to-end application has successfully been provisioned. See Figure 13-18.

Figure 13-19 shows the summary of this scenario.