Part 4! of the series "10 Things Vmware Server Admins Should Know About Self-Service Catalogs and Lifecycle Management" that I'll be publishing over the next couple of weeks.
4. There's a lot more to setting up environments than provisioning servers, the service catalog provides access to all the other required services.
It's great that you can quickly get a server instance going. Awesome, really. But that's not an application hosting service. It's important to understand the "whole product" requested. Is it a raw computing power w/ an OS? or is it an application stack? Or particular integration points, network, storage and security?
There's a need to really think from a whole product perspective. What ancillary services need to go be coordinated to deliver an environment. Typically we'll need to consider
- Network
- Storage
- Security
- Middleware
- Data
- Applications
Sometimes we can create complete application stacks such as: "Small Linux / JBoss / Oracle for standard development." Other times, these items required hand-offs between teams.
In talking with VM admins, sometimes there's a bit of the "not my problem" mentality -- it's those other jerks who are slow. But if the think about our job as delivering environments that can work in a data center or in the cloud and as we virtualized the network and storage, there's more and more need for having a catalog of individual server request as well as complete environment
The service catalog contains all the other services that the customer needs in to deploy their application.
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