New White Paper, Implementing a Private Cloud with VMware vRealize and XtremIO X2

This white paper reviews the integration of VMware vSphere virtual infrastructure with the vRealize Orchestrator (vRO)
and vRealize Automation (vRA) tools when using Dell EMC XtremIO X2 all-flash storage array as the storage backend of
the environment. It discusses the benefits of using XtremIO X2 for virtualized and cloud environments and describes its
integration in such a solution using the XtremIO plugin for VMware vRealize Orchestrator, and how it can be leveraged for
automation with the VMware vRealize Automation tool. XtremIO storage-related, built-in and customized vRO workflows
and vRA services will be showcased in this white paper as a proof of concept for XtremIO’s integration in the solution,
together with examples of how to use and work with these private cloud tools.

Business Case
Private cloud solutions are emerging all over in the Information Technology (IT) world to provide IT departments with the
ability to design automated workflows that mirror the organization’s IT procedures (simple or complex), and to provide a
way to offload the operation of some of those procedures to their customers (application teams) for quicker deployment
and provisioning of computer resources and services in the organization. One such private cloud solution is VMware’s
vRealize Suite. The Suite equips IT departments with the vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) tool that enables using built-in
workflows and designing new ones that suit the organization’s processes, and the vRealize Automation (vRA) tool that
integrates with vRO and enables the automation and offloading of processes as services to the customers. The Suite also
includes vRealize Operations Manager (that collects performance and capacity data and monitors the infrastructure) and
vRealize Log Insight (that provides real-time log administration across all of the cloud’s components), but the focus in this
paper will be on the automation and orchestration tools.
With vRealize Orchestrator, clients can easily design and deploy scalable workflows to automate simple or complex IT
processes, which can significantly simplify and accelerate IT operations in the organization. By using this tool, IT
departments can reduce their operating expenses and be less susceptible to user errors, thus improving their service
delivery efficiency and operational management. vRO enables customers to create their own workflows to accommodate
IT operations in their environment, and leverage built-in workflows and actions based on SOAP, REST operations and
PowerShell scripts. Using plug-ins and external packages, customers can automate the management and operational
tasks of third-party applications, tools and infrastructure, further utilizing vRO and simplifying IT processes across all
components of their datacenters.
The vRealize Automation tool provides IT automation through the creation and management of personalized
infrastructure, applications and custom IT services across multi-vendor and multi-cloud environments. It accelerates the
end-to-end delivery of those applications and services and ensures that clients receive the right size of resources at the
appropriate service level for the jobs they need to perform. Those otherwise manual, time-consuming procedures will now
become automatic, thus reducing the operational cost of managing the environment and making IT service delivery
processes more responsive to business needs. vRA presents a self-service interface that can rapidly deliver building
blocks to developers and application teams. With vRA you can streamline and automate the lifecycle management of an
environment, from initial deployment and on-going rebalance of resources to the retirement and reclamation of those
resources. A tight integration with vRealize Orchestrator makes coupling these two tools invaluable for the organization’s
automation ambitions, as vRA can publish and combine vRO workflows as services to clients.

To complement a private cloud solution, IT departments must choose a storage system that will be fast and efficient for
cloud environments and one that integrates well with the chosen private cloud software. Dell EMC’s XtremIO X2 storage
system fits those needs entirely. The proficient new-generation all-flash array is a perfect fit for cloud environments. Its
unique scale-out architecture enables servicing dynamic amounts of data at each scale, and its Data Reduction abilities
(such as thin provisioning, deduplication and compression) reduce the physical storage needed for the logical data by at
least a few orders of magnitude, allowing customers to save in both space and storage costs. Being a 100% flash-based
technology, XtremIO was built specifically to utilize its flash disks at an optimal level, which allows delivering ultra-high
performance for the cloud infrastructure at a very low latency, for both FC and iSCSI connections. XtremIO’s Copy Data
Services also present a great benefit for cloud environments, as entire projects and tenants in the cloud can be copied to
new test, development and analytics projects for almost no extra space in the storage system and with no performance
degradation to either environment. XtremIO comes with an easy-to-use user interface to provide storage administrators a
quick and convenient way of setting up enterprise class storage environments, provisioning storage to client hosts and
applications, and monitoring performance. With the XtremIO plugin for vRealize Orchestrator (and other plugins for VSI
and for vRealize Operations Manager and Log Insight), XtremIO integrates with VMware’s cloud solution to provide the
customer with all of its storage needs, and enables management and automation of services through both the vRO and
vRA tools.

You can watch a demo about how it all integrates here

And you can download the white paper by clicking the url below