Understanding Intersight Workload Optimizer Supply Chain
Intersight Workload Optimizer models your environment as a market of buyers and sellers. It discovers different types of entities in your environment via the targets you have added, and it then maps these entities to the supply chain to manage the workloads they support. For example, for a hypervisor target, IWO discovers VMs, the hosts and datastores that provide resources to the VMs, and the applications that use VM resources. For a Kubernetes target, it discovers services, namespaces, containers, container pods, and nodes. The entities in your environment form a chain of supply and demand, where some entities provide resources while others consume the supplied resources. IWO stitches these entities together, for example, by connecting the discovered Kubernetes nodes with the discovered VMs in vCenter.
Supply Chain Terminology
Cisco introduces specific terms to express IT resources and utilization in relation to supply and demand. The terms shown in Table 5-1 are largely intuitive, but you should understand how they relate to the issues and activities that are common for IT management.
Table 5-1 The Supply Chain Terminologies Used in IWO
Term |
Definition |
|---|---|
Commodity |
This is the basic building block of IWO supply and demand. All the resources that IWO monitors are commodities. For example, the CPU capacity and memory that a host can provide are commodities. IWO can also represent clusters and segments as commodities. When the user interface (UI) shows “commodities,” it’s showing the resources a service provides. When the interface shows “commodities bought,” it’s showing what that service consumes. |
Composed of |
This refers to the resources or commodities that make up the given service. For example, in the UI you might see that a certain VM is composed of commodities, such as one or more physical CPUs, an Ethernet interface, and physical memory. Contrast “composed of” with “consumes,” where consumption refers to the commodities the VM has bought. Also contrast “composed of” with the commodities a service offers for sale. A host might include four CPUs in its composition, but it offers CPU cycles as a single commodity. |
Consumes |
This refers to the services and commodities a service has bought. A service consumes other commodities. For example, a VM consumes the commodities offered by a host, and an application consumes commodities from one or more VMs. In the UI, you can explore the services that provide the commodities the current service consumes. |
Entity |
This refers to a buyer or seller in the market. For example, a VM or a data-stores is an entity. |
Environment |
This refers to the totality of data center, network, host, storage, VM, and application resources that you are monitoring. |
Inventory |
This is the list of all entities in your environment. |
Risk Index |
This is a measure of the risk to quality of service (QoS) that a consumer will experience. The higher the Risk Index (RI) on a provider, the more risk to QoS for any consumer of that provider’s services. For example, a host provides resources to one or more VMs. The higher the RI on the provider, the more likely that the VMs will experience QoS degradation. In most cases, for optimal operation, the RI on a provider should not go into double digits. |
Working with Intersight Workload Optimizer
The public cloud provides compute, storage, and other resources on demand. By adding an AWS Billing Target (AWS) or Microsoft Enterprise Agreement (Azure) to use custom pricing and discover reserved instances, you enable IWO to use that richer pricing information to calculate workload size and RI coverage for your Azure environment. You can run all of your infrastructure on a public cloud, or you can set up a hybrid environment where you burst workload to the public cloud as needed. IWO can analyze the performance of applications running on the public cloud and then provision more instances as demand requires. For a hybrid environment, IWO can provision copies of your application VMs on the public cloud to satisfy spikes in demand, and as demand falls off, it can suspend those VMs if they’re no longer needed. With public cloud targets, you can use IWO to perform the following tasks:
Scale VMs and databases
Change storage tiers
Purchase VM reservations
Locate the most efficient workload placement within the hybrid environment while ensuring performance
Detect unused storage volumes
Claiming AWS Targets
For IWO to manage an AWS account, you provide the credentials via the Access Key that you use to access that account. (For information about getting an Access Key for an AWS account, see the Amazon Web Services documentation.)
To add an AWS target, specify the following:
Custom Target Name: The display name that will be used to identify the target in the Target List. This is for display in the UI only; it does not need to match any internal name.
Access Key: Provide the Access Key for the account you want to manage.
Access Key Secret: Provide the Access Key Secret for the account you want to manage.
Claiming Azure Targets
Microsoft Azure is Microsoft’s infrastructure platform for the public cloud. You gain access to this infrastructure through a service principal target. To specify an Azure target, you provide the credentials for the subscription and IWO discovers the resources available to you through that service principal. Through Azure service principal targets, IWO automatically discovers the subscriptions to which the service principal has been granted access in the Azure portal. This, in turn, creates a derived target for each subscription that inherits the authorization provided by the service principal (for example, contributor). You cannot directly modify a derived target, but IWO validates the target and discovers its inventory as it does with any other target.
To claim an Azure service principal target, you must meet the following requirements:
Set up your Azure service principal subscription to grant IWO the access it needs. To set up the Azure subscription, you must access the Administrator or Co-Administrator Azure Portal (portal.azure.com). Note that this access is only required for the initial setup. IWO does not require this access for regular operation.
Claim the target with the credentials that result from the subscription setup (Tenant ID, Client ID, and so on).
Azure Resource Manager Intersight Workload Optimizer requires the Azure Resource Manager deployment and management service. This provides the management layer that IWO uses to discover and manage entities in your Azure environment.