Author: James Kahn, Systems Engineer, Vizioncore
Hi, James Kahn here again, Systems Engineer for Vizioncore in Australia, talking about automation.
As the name implies, automation is taking time-consuming, manual tasks, and making them automatic. Automation itself has been present in IT for years in many forms, ranging from administrator scripts to single-purpose toolset applications.While automation has previously been a nice-to-have, and used in an ad-hoc fashion for many IT departments, with IDC’s estimated 40% year-on-year VM growth (Source: IDC, Virtualization and Multicore Innovations Disrupt the WW Server Market, Doc #206035) – virtual machine sprawl – automation is fast becoming a necessity for IT department productivity with an ever-growing number of VMs in the enterprise.
An automation framework should be easy to use, so that automation is easy to implement in the business. For IT automation to be effective, it needs to be accessible to the administrators and engineers that will be using it.
The Virtualization EcoShell – the brainchild of Scott Herold – is an administrator level automation tool to quickly and easily improve individual productivity when managing a virtualized environment.Out of the box – or straight from the download, if we’re being pedantic – you can do tasks like automatically build a Visio diagram of your virtualized environment, or have all your ESX hosts instantly scan for new storage, tasks that have traditionally taken a lot of time. You can also use EcoShell to build PowerShell scripts to automate environment-specific tasks.
Most of the benefits of automation are realized when it is fully embraced by IT as a whole, rather than by individual administrators. vControl is a virtualization automation framework that allows the automation philosophy to be integrated into IT operations – the entire IT department, and therefore the business, can benefit from automation, with systems knowledge and automation processes contained centrally rather than in disparate scripts spread throughout the enterprise. IT Subject Matter Experts can embed routine operational tasks in the framework, freeing time to focus on pro-active projects, rather than operating reactively.vControl uses drag-and-drop and a diverse set of options for building automation workflows – including integrating standard script languages like PowerShell and batch files that you are probably already using.So
All this talk of automation and efficiency is great, but I’m a concrete example kind of guy, and I like to hear of specific examples. I’m guessing you do too. I’ve put together three possible examples below of how you could benefit from automation.Example 1:A misbehaving multi-tier application crashes relatively often, and needs frequent rebooting in a specific order, otherwise it doesn’t start. Rather than waiting for users to open a helpdesk ticket, create an automation workflow that executes every Saturday at 3am to:
Example 2:IT is doing a network migration project and needs to migrate hundreds, or even thousands of virtual machines to a different virtual network overnight. Create a workflow to switch the virtual machine’s networks to the new network, and execute it to quickly cutover to the new network.Example 3:The company’s main website has unpredictable periods of very high traffic. Create a workflow to measure load and response time of a web application, and automatically start up new web servers and reconfigure a network load balancer as demand increases. Shut them down as demand decreases.I’m only just scratching the surface here with these examples.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>One of the great things about automation is that you can tune it to your business requirements.The potential is huge.
- JK.