Out-of-the-Box Services

One of the main advantaged of CLM is that it supports the VMDC reference tenant services out of the box, so while these didn’t fit ABCNet’s long-term requirements, they did allow ABCNet to launch a cloud service relatively quickly. This, in turn, allowed ABCNet to capture Diggit’s cloud business.

The VMDC reference services are based around the concept of a network container. The network container provides an abstraction of network resources that can be presented to users through a self-service portal. Providing users with a selection of predefined network containers practically eliminates the need for manually provisioning each network element in the underlying core, aggregation, and access layers, which in turn greatly reduces, if not outright eliminates, direct operator involvement in provisioning a virtualized data center. As a result, the network container approach can reduce service provisioning time from days and weeks to practically minutes. Further, when a user requests a given network container, the self-service portal can also allow users to specify and launch virtual machines inside their containers. As discussed in Chapter 10, “Technical Building Blocks of IaaS,” and Chapter 11, “Automating and Orchestration Resources,” the resource management and workflow mechanisms provided by such a system allow resource provisioning to be automated through the placement of variables in the physical data center systems. Figure A-11 illustrates these concepts.