Technical white paper

HP Cloud Maps for rapid provisioning of infrastructure and applications

Table of contents

Executive summary 2

Introduction 2

What is an HP Cloud Map? 3 HP Cloud Map components 3

Enabling technologies for HP Cloud Maps 4

HP Cloud Map types and execution processes 5

HP Cloud Maps for infrastructure provisioning 6 HP Cloud Maps for application deployment 7 HP Cloud Maps for lifecycle management 7

HP Cloud Map portfolio 8

Working with HP Cloud Maps 12

Conclusion 15

Appendix – Platforms enabling HP Cloud Maps 16

For more information 17

Click here to verify the latest version of this document. Created September 2012.

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Executive summary Organizations building cloud environments, whether for internal use or to provide services to others, face challenges in delivering application services. Preparing to deliver a catalog of cloud services requires many steps. Designing and configuring server, storage, and network infrastructure is just the start. Users must also define the application service end-to-end, ready for use, so that it consistently meets business needs. This means characterizing workloads, specifying an optimized application environment, optimizing reliability and scalability, and automating workflows.

All of this takes time, trial and error, and a good measure of specialized knowledge, which adds up to higher costs, complexity, and risk. Because of the sheer breadth of applications that today’s enterprises must deal with, it is impractical for any customer to have a deep understanding of them all. One organization might lack the cloud-specific expertise necessary to successfully deploy a certain application. Another might struggle to ensure the performance levels that users expect. Even when applications are deployed, they often lack the performance and reliability end users require and expect.

HP has the answer with Cloud Maps. Cloud Maps allow you to create application environments quickly for HP CloudSystem and HP Cloud Service Automation. Over and above the time savings, HP Cloud Maps:

• Provide the fastest way to design new infrastructure and business services for cloud deployment, often in less than an hour

• Enable repeatable, proven deployments that lower risk and assure optimized performance and service levels

• Eliminate design and ongoing application maintenance errors, giving clients proven cloud service designs right out of the box

Using HP Cloud Maps, customers can save up to 200 staff-hours per application in design, development, and deployment and can choose from our rich catalog of enterprise business applications. HP Cloud Maps automate the provisioning and maintenance of physical and virtual infrastructure, operating systems, and applications to enable greater flexibility, compliance, and reliability for our clients.

Target audience: The information contained in this white paper is intended for solutions architects, engineers, and project managers involved in creating application environments for HP CloudSystem and HP Cloud Service Automation.

Introduction HP CloudSystem is the most complete, integrated and open platform for building and managing cloud services across private, public, and hybrid environments. HP CloudSystem is part of the the HP Converged Cloud portfolio, the industry’s first hybrid delivery approach and portfolio based on a common architecture. The portfolio addresses all deployment models (private, public, and hybrid) and cloud service models.

HP Cloud Maps are prepackaged, optimized, and tested configurations for use with HP CloudSystem and related software to automate the deployment of applications. With HP Cloud Maps you can achieve application service design, provisioning, and lifecycle management in minutes rather than months.

IDC has determined that the time to deploy a cloud service is approximately 10 weeks. This is clearly not good enough when we are talking about needing to move at cloud speed. Most cloud implementations to-date have focused on what is commonly known as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). IaaS is a great step forward that carries value, but the reality is that business users want to deploy business applications, not just infrastructure. It can take 10 weeks to deliver a service because even if you have the cloud infrastructure ready to go, you still need to design how applications will be deployed on top of it. You need to get all the expert resources across areas like server, storage, network, application, and middleware. Then you need to design how the deployment will look. You then need to build all the deployment assets, publish this in your service catalog, activate it, and manage the lifecycle of the application while it is running. This entire process takes a lot of time. Moreover it is:

• Error-prone with too many hand-offs

• Not easily repeatable

• Expensive due to high reliance on expert resources

Instead of spending up to 10 weeks going through the manual process, you can obtain a Cloud Map and make the application available to your users in as little as one hour.

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HP collaborates with major software application vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP to develop optimized configurations for common applications. These configurations, called Cloud Maps, are both infrastructure and application-service-design best practices for deploying HP hardware and popular business applications for HP CloudSystem. We develop Cloud Maps to accelerate the creation of a service catalog through automation of the infrastructure and application provisioning and deployment.

This paper explains the value of HP Cloud Maps and provides the information you need to access the HP Cloud Map portfolio, download the Cloud Maps you want, and then use them to build your own service catalog. Specifically, the paper explains the following topics:

• Elements of a Cloud Map

• Cloud Maps portfolio and example

• Working with Cloud Maps

The appendix includes information on platforms enabling Cloud Maps, including key software components.

What is an HP Cloud Map? A Cloud Map is a set of pre-designed templates, workflows, and scripts that you can use to deploy and manage your server, storage, and network resources as a service for specific software applications. Each Cloud Map includes components to build a service catalog entry that meets your requirements for fast and consistent delivery of high quality cloud-based services. A service catalog is a standard set of product/service offerings for unifying all the applications under IT control.

HP Cloud Map components A typical Cloud Map may consist of these tested components:

• Infrastructure templates (also known as service designs) for hardware and software configurations that you can import directly into your cloud solution to save days or weeks of service catalog design time

• Deployment workflows and scripts to automate installation in a repeatable fashion

• Patching, compliance, and code release workflows for many Cloud Maps to automate post-deployment application lifecycle management

• Reference white papers to help customize Cloud Maps for specific implementations

• Wizard-based configurations to automate the custom implementation to your specific environment

Templates or Service Designs HP Cloud Map templates or service designs specify requirements for infrastructure, OS, middleware, database, and application configurations. A template or service design captures detailed requirements for a service:

• Servers (multiple tiers and nodes, physical and virtual)

• Storage

• Network

• Application deployment

• Application patch, compliance, and code release

Workflows and scripts Another component of HP Cloud Maps is workflows and scripts. These tools are logically linked sequences of steps for doing operations tasks. Workflows capture the required steps to automate simple or complex tasks for automatically executing changes quickly, reliably, and without human error. They enable a repeatable, standard process for deploying application services. For example, a workflow in a Cloud Map could, at installation time, create additional users, install an application, set system parameters, and start the application.

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Reference white papers HP Cloud Map white papers provide you the details for provisioning an environment suitable for a specific application. HP Cloud map white papers explain the following:

• Architecture requirements to support the specific workload

• Details on how to import the template

• Details on how to import the associated workflows for automating the installation and configuration

• Information on what to modify to successfully run this template and deploy the specific application

Once you have selected an HP Cloud Map that represents the application you want to implement, start by reading the white paper.

Sizers For some HP Cloud Maps, we provide sizer programs for customizing infrastructure for your specific service needs. Based on your input, these sizers can provide a comprehensive bill of materials along with a deployment overview of the server roles and storage configurations. To verify if an HP Cloud Map contains a sizer program for your specific application, go to the HP Cloud Maps page (www.hp.com/go/cloudmaps) and select the desired software vendor and application.

Enabling technologies for HP Cloud Maps HP Matrix Operating Environment (OE) is cloud management software for IaaS that enables you to design and provision infrastructure services in minutes via a self-service portal, optimize infrastructure for capacity planning, and protect service continuity with automated, cost-effective failover. Matrix OE is fully integrated into HP CloudSystem, providing the ability to deliver IaaS. A core component of HP Matrix OE is infrastructure orchestration (IO). It allows you to use a self-service portal to provision infrastructure consistently and automatically from pools of shared resources. With the Matrix OE IO designer interface, you can easily import, create, or customize these infrastructure templates using a drag-and-drop editor. Figure 1 shows the infrastructure orchestration designer interface for managing templates. Once a template is complete, you can publish it to the self-service portal and export it in XML format to share. You can also assign costs per component to use for reports or showback/chargeback.

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Figure 1. HP Matrix OE infrastructure orchestration designer allows you to build templates.

HP Operations Orchestration (OO) automates processes such as incident resolution, change orchestration, and maintenance tasks. It visually composes a service definition, using a library of design elements assembled to describe infrastructure, applications, and external integrations. For infrastructure provisioning Cloud Maps, Matrix OE infrastructure orchestration leverages an embedded version of HP OO software as a workflow automation tool to make infrastructure delivery processes more efficient and reliable across IT functions. HP OO automates processes and orchestrates complex IT workflows across your enterprise data center. With the orchestration capability of Matrix OE you can accelerate the design and delivery of infrastructure resources by creating templates. These templates can then be reused indefinitely. This means you can visually design a catalog of infrastructure service templates, including multi-tier, multi-node configurations that you can activate in minutes. Authorized users can provision infrastructure from pools of shared server, storage, and network resources through a self-service portal, which automates and streamlines the approval process for requested infrastructure. Once you have built your service configurations, you can store them in your service catalog and use them for needed deployments.

HP Cloud Service Automation (CSA) is a comprehensive solution for brokering and managing application and infrastructure services. HP CSA offers a self-service portal and application and infrastructure provisioning for private, public, and hybrid cloud services. It provides advanced provisioning and management of applications and infrastructure with industry best practice templates, a highly flexible architecture with advanced workload optimization and metering, service assurance, application lifecycle management, security, and compliance.

HP Server Automation (SA) provides lifecycle management for enterprise servers and applications from discovery to provisioning, patching to configuration management, and script execution to compliance assurance. In HP CloudSystem Enterprise, SA automates key tasks associated with managing physical and virtual servers across disparate IT teams and systems.

HP Cloud Map types and execution processes HP has developed Cloud Maps for a wide range of service requirements (Table 1). For infrastructure provisioning, HP Cloud Maps focus on the design of the server, storage, and networking infrastructure for running applications. Many of these infrastructure Cloud Maps also include basic application deployment. HP Cloud Maps for application deployment automate deployment of enterprise applications. HP Cloud Maps for lifecycle management specify infrastructure

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provisioning with advanced application deployment and lifecycle management (including patching, code release, and compliance).

Table 1. HP Cloud Maps define optimal configuration for specific applications and functionality.

Infrastructure Provisioning Application Deployment Lifecycle Management

Focus Provision multi-tier infrastructure (server, storage, network)

Automate deployment of enterprise applications

Provision infrastructure, deploy and manage applications end-to-end, including patching, code release, and compliance

Technology platforms

• CloudSystem Matrix • CloudSystem Enterprise

• CloudSystem Service Provider

• Cloud Service Automation (CSA)

• CloudSystem Enterprise

• CloudSystem Service Provider

Content sources

• Matrix OE templates and scripts

• Infrastructure Orchestration (IO) workflows

• Shell scripts or files

• White paper(s)

• HP Server Automation (SA) software policy

• HP CSA service design template

• HP Operations Orchestration (OO) based, wizard-driven installer

• White paper(s)

• Matrix OE templates and scripts

• HP application automation software configuration workflows

• HP OO integration workflows

• HP CSA service design template

• White paper(s)

HP Cloud Maps for infrastructure provisioning HP Cloud Maps for infrastructure provisioning contain a white paper describing the design of the Cloud Map along with a guide to customization and implementation. These Cloud Maps also contain one or more of the following:

• Application-specific infrastructure template to be imported into HP IO designer interface

• Workflows to be imported into embedded HP OO

• Any additional shell scripts or files that may be required for deploying applications

Matrix OE infrastructure orchestration supports a variety of mechanisms for deployment such as Insight Control, Ignite-UX, or HP SA. Matrix OE performs virtual deployments through the appropriate hypervisor server (for example, VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V) or through SA. Figure 2 shows the software steps from infrastructure provisioning through application deployment on a newly deployed server after the Cloud Map is installed in Matrix OE.

Figure 2. This diagram shows the execution flow for infrastructure provisioning Cloud Maps using HP Server Automation.

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The first step is to go to the self-service portal and log in. You will see a list of services specific to you. Select the appropriate infrastructure template that describes all the servers, storage, and network configurations for that Cloud Map, and submit the request by clicking the Create Service button. HP IO allocates the appropriate resources and deploys the requested servers (physical and/or virtual) attaching storage, IP addresses, host names, etc.

A custom HP OO workflow is executed. It is responsible for staging the software on the servers and running the installation routine.

HP Cloud Maps for application deployment HP Cloud Maps for application deployment contain these components:

• Application-specific content such as HP SA software policy or the HP CSA service design template

• White papers for Cloud Map design, customization, and extension guidelines

• HP OO based, wizard-driven installer to accelerate and automate installation and design of the service

Figure 3 shows the execution flow for an application deployment Cloud Map.

Figure 3. This diagram shows the execution flow for an application deployment Cloud Map.

HP Cloud Maps for application deployment provide a programmatic wizard, a software interface that leads the service designer through the required steps by asking questions (for example, how much memory do you want to make available to this application). It uses the answers to those questions to automate the creation of the service design.

HP Cloud Maps for lifecycle management HP Cloud Maps for lifecycle management contain a white paper describing the service creation design for creating, customizing, and extending a Cloud Map. The Cloud Maps provide infrastructure and application deployment along with ongoing application patching, code release, and compliance as a cloud-delivered service. They also contain these components:

• HP Matrix OE infrastructure template for infrastructure provisioning for the application

• HP application automation software configuration workflows initially based on HP Database and Middleware Automation (DMA) for applications such as IBM WebSphere and Oracle databases

• HP OO integration flows to automate the service process

Figure 4 shows the execution flow for a lifecycle management Cloud Map.

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Figure 4. This diagram shows the execution flow for lifecycle management Cloud Maps.

The execution flow shown in the diagram has two phases: the virtual machine/infrastructure phase and the application lifecycle actions phase.

The virtual machine/infrastructure phase (shown in blue) begins with HP CSA. Upon receiving a service request, HP CSA calls HP OO to run a flow that implements the request. The flow orchestrates the work of all contributing technologies. HP CSA then calls HP Matrix OE and executes a specific HP IO template. HP Matrix OE provides the physical or virtual machine to host the application. For a physical machine, HP Matrix OE calls HP SA or other provisioning software to provision and manage a physical machine. If a virtual machine is required, HP Matrix OE calls VMware vCenter or other provisioning software to provision a virtual machine that will be managed by HP SA. In both cases, HP SA manages the host machine.

In the application lifecycle actions phase (shown in gray), HP OO flows are used to run operations that install the required HP SA policy. That policy enables the execution of HP DMA workflows on the target physical or virtual machine that has just been provisioned. As a final step, HP OO calls HP DMA to execute application-specific workflows.

HP Cloud Map portfolio Figure 5 shows the entry page for the HP Cloud Maps: http://www.hp.com/go/cloudmaps. This is the starting point for obtaining your HP Cloud Maps.

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Figure 5. HP Cloud Maps main page is the starting point for downloading a Cloud Map from hp.com.

Note the tabs for Infrastructure Provisioning, Application Deployment, and Lifecycle Management. This is where you can directly download HP Cloud Maps for infrastructure provisioning and lifecycle management or request an application deployment Cloud Map. Select one of these tabs based on the application you are going to deploy in your cloud. For example, if you selected the Infrastructure Provisioning tab, opened “Microsoft” from the vendor list, you would go to the page shown in Figure 6.

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Figure 6. Selecting Microsoft from the vendor list on the Infrastructure Provisioning tab brings up the HP Cloud Maps for Microsoft page.

This page contains links to templates, white papers, and sizers for currently supported Microsoft applications. After selecting the application you want to deploy, you would use the “Templates, workflow and scripts” link to get the Cloud Map for the application. A white paper describing the solution for that specific HP Cloud Map provides significant detail on the inner workings of that Cloud Map.

If you select the Application Deployment tab from the Cloud Maps Solutions main page, and then select any application, a form will appear for you to request the Cloud Map (Figure 7).

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Figure 7. Selecting any application from the vendor list in the Application Deployment tab brings up this form.

After you submit the form, an HP sales representative will contact you to discuss your Cloud Map request.

If you select the Lifecycle Management tab from the Cloud Maps Solutions main page, and then select any application, a form will appear for you to request the Cloud Map (Figure 8).

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Figure 8. Selecting any application from the vendor list in the Lifecycle Management tab brings up this screen.

After you submit the form, you will be prompted to download the Cloud Map.

Working with HP Cloud Maps To use the Cloud Map, you download the template or service design, workflows, and scripts from the HP Cloud Map website or fill out the form to request the Cloud Map. Then you extract the contents of the ZIP file. Once you have done that, follow the steps in the associated white paper to implement the Cloud Map. For many Cloud Maps, we have automated the customization process. White papers included in the Cloud Map contain instructions for importing the template or service design and other configuration details.

Figure 9 shows a template for an Exchange 2010 infrastructure provisioning Cloud Map that we have imported into the infrastructure orchestration designer. Within the display window, you can see the required resources for this service: physical server, virtual machine, storage, and network resources. You can change the template by dragging components from your system resource pool in the upper left corner of the window. By right-clicking on any resource icon, you can set additional resource-specific attributes. When you make a service request based on a published template, the allocation process validates that all the required resources are available to allocate for the service.

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Figure 9. HP Matrix infrastructure orchestration designer shows imported Microsoft Exchange 2010 Gold Tier Cloud Map.

In this example, the “Exchange2010GoldTier-5K” template provides the blueprint for deploying an Exchange 2010 service and will perform the following tasks:

• Provision the infrastructure resources (server, storage, and network)

• Install the OS

• Install Exchange

• Configure Exchange to support 5,000 users with 1 GB mailboxes based on a gold tier service level requirement

For this Exchange 2010 service, we allocate a mixture of physical servers and virtual machines (VMs). We deploy the Exchange Client Access Server (CAS) and Hub Transport (HT) server roles on Hyper-V virtual machines, while provisioning the Exchange mailbox servers on physical server blades.

For the Exchange 2010 template, we place an increased workload on the Exchange 2010 CAS server because this role now serves as the messaging application program interface (MAPI) endpoint for Outlook client connections. With this increased workload, Microsoft recommends a 4:3 mailbox server-to-CAS core ratio. Thus, this design uses three 4-core VMs, for a total of 12 cores, to support the 16 mailbox processor cores. Each VM has 8 GB of memory to satisfy the 2 GB per core recommendation.

From a networking perspective, we define three NICs for the CAS server role. One of the NICs serves as a dedicated management NIC (optional). The other two NICs on the production network will form the network load balancing (NLB) cluster for the three CAS Exchange servers.

For the HT server role, we provision two VMs with four processor cores each for the recommended mailbox server-to-HT server core ratio of 5:1.

For the two mailbox servers supporting 5000 users, the design recommendations are eight cores and 32 GB of memory per server. During normal operation, each server will host 2500 users. However, we size each mailbox server to support 5000 active users in case a server failure occurs.

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To support the storage requirements for 5,000 users with 1 GB mailboxes, we configure 20 databases hosting 250 users per database. During normal operation, each mailbox server will host 10 active database copies (supporting 2500 users) while maintaining each of the 10 active database copies on the other mailbox server.

After full resource allocation, the final automated step is execution of an embedded HP OO workflow to install and configure Exchange 2010 (Figure 10).

Figure 10. The OO Studio view shows Gold Tier Exchange 2010 Service Deployment workflow.

You can attach embedded workflows to infrastructure orchestration templates at several execution points. For the Exchange Gold Tier service in our example, we wrote an embedded HP OO workflow to perform the following tasks:

• Install the Windows Server 2008 server roles and features required to support Exchange 2010

• Install the necessary prerequisite software

• Format and partition additional data LUNs for the HT and mailbox servers

• Install appropriate Exchange 2010 roles on the correct servers

• Configure role-specific Exchange 2010 servers

At this point in the process, you can add mailboxes to the Exchange 2010 environment.

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HP workflows and templates are optimized out of the box based on hundreds of hours of HP and partner testing, but you can easily modify this workflow framework and extend it to include additional Exchange configuration tasks specific to your Exchange service deployments.

Conclusion By leveraging HP Cloud Maps for CloudSystem, enterprises can save weeks in deploying cloud services. We offer the industry’s first pre-packaged, customizable application templates for leading business applications. HP Cloud Maps support multiple usage models, infrastructure and applications, provisioning and lifecycle management. Using HP Cloud Maps ensures proven, reliable, and repeatable application deployments. It eliminates design and application maintenance errors, increases security and availability through built-in compliance policies, and optimizes use of valuable IT resources.

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Appendix – Platforms enabling HP Cloud Maps HP Converged Infrastructure technologies are at the core of the HP CloudSystem portfolio. Because Converged Infrastructure uses a shared services model, with pools of compute, storage, and network resources, it is an ideal foundation for cloud computing. HP CloudSystem is built on the modular, standards-based HP BladeSystem and its proven innovations, including Virtual Connect and Matrix OE. It is optimized for HP ProLiant and HP Integrity servers as well as HP storage and HP networking. It also supports heterogeneous environments and third-party x86 servers, networking, and storage. CloudSystem also integrates with virtualization technologies from VMware and Microsoft, for example, through the integration of virtual machine (VM) template libraries.

HP CloudSystem has three integrated platforms:

• HP CloudSystem Matrix is a private cloud that provides infrastructure as a service (IaaS), as well as basic application deployment and monitoring. This is an entry-level cloud solution for businesses that want to set up their own private cloud.

• HP CloudSystem Enterprise is a private or hybrid cloud solution and the full range of service models: IaaS, platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS). This solution provides a single service view of your environments, from private cloud to public clouds to traditional IT, with advanced application-to-infrastructure lifecycle management.

• HP CloudSystem Service Provider is a public or hosted private cloud designed for service providers to provide a public cloud IaaS and SaaS, including aggregation and management of those services.

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For more information

Visit the URLs listed below if you need additional information.

Resource description Web address

HP CloudSystem http://www.hp.com/go/cloudsystem

HP Cloud Maps website http://www.hp.com/go/cloudmaps

HP Cloud Service Automation http://www.hp.com/go/csa

HP Matrix OE 7.1 Infrastructure Orchestration User Guide

http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c03326771.pdf

HP BladeSystem http://www.hp.com/go/bladesystem

HP BladeSystem technical resources http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/cache/316682-0-0-0-121.html

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© Copyright 2012 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

Microsoft and Windows are U.S. registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

TC0000749, Created in September 2012