Saturday 30 May 2015

HP Cloud Service Automation - Part 3

HP Cloud Service Automation - Part 3

Fun with Tags! Before we get stuck into Offerings there are ways to organise Designs and Offerings within CSA that might help to know about. They aren't easily retrofitted but knowing how to use Tags means you can set these up as you go and structure things as an Architect more effectively.

Tags aren't seen or used by consumers, they are just ways to organise the information in CSA. You create separate Tags for Designs and for Offerings.

If you go to the Designs section, into either Sequenced or Topology you will see an icon at the bottom left of the screen like this:
Click on it to bring up the dialog to create a number of Design Tags. Click the +

Now enter in the information you require and do this a number of times until you have created sufficient tags to organise your Designs. Select Colours and an image:
If you want to use a custom image such as a particular customer's Logo then following the instructions below from CSA help:

Image - An image that displays for the tag. Click Change Image. Choose the image you want, and click Select. Click Upload to add your own image. Supported file extensions include .jpg, .jpeg, .gif, and .png. The recommended image size is 256 by 256 pixels, and the image will be scaled to the appropriate size. The images are stored in the %CSA_HOME%\jboss-as\standalone\deployments\csa.war\images\library folder of the HP CSA server.

You can now assign Tags to service designs as you create them. You will get your selection during the procedure as shown below.

If you already have a design you have to add a tag when creating a new version. Just use the Edit button in the Overview screen BEFORE you publish it again!

Now you can select the Tags on the left to only show those Design's with that particular design property. As your environment grows you may have many customer specific designs, some in testing, some ready for production and this will help ensure you organize those designs. If you add version 1.0.4 to a Test Tag and then 1.0.5 to a Production Tag, the Design will show up in both Tag entries but with the correct version ID against it.


You can edit Tags and change icons and colours afterwards. If you delete a tag, the version of the design goes back to Tagless.

Offerings also provide Tags as a way to structure them within CSA. You can assign a Tag on creation or when creating a new version (before you publish it). You click on the same icon and get the dialog below to start generating Offering Tags:
This is similar to the Design Tag screen and much the same process. The new offering version I'm creating below gives me the opportunity to select a Tag here.
You can also edit an existing Offering that isn't published (Either create a new version, or unpublish an existing Offering, edit the Tag and publish again).

There's not much more to Tags than that but it's handier earlier on how they can make your life easier!

Monday 25 May 2015

HP Cloud Service Automation - Part 2

HP Cloud Service Automation - Part 2

Once you have HP OO installed and integrate CSA you'll notice a lot of CSA content packs appear in OO, the demo appliance I'd assume has this setup already but a vanilla OO install only has a few to start with otherwise. When you use the Topology Designer it injects system generated flows into OO which reflect the new Topology Designs - 1 for each version (Apologies for the massive screenshots from OO!):


You can deploy updated, new and custom content packs into OO and reference them in CSA but more frequently when using the sequenced designer. That designer gives you much more control BUT is harder to configure. The new Topology Designer as you can see above is more "integrated" and easier to use BUT doesn't let you do much "outside the box". It will improve in future versions of CSA I'm sure but you will need to understand the limitations of Topology Designer and when using the Sequence Designer makes sense. Read the Concepts guide if you haven't already! I'm still learning about the differences myself!

To integrate with vCenter you need to start by logging in. I've provided some URLs from my Lab below which can be adjusted for your environment, sometimes you need particular port numbers to work which can be annoying if you forget what they are so bookmark the ones in your lab before you forget!!
https://hpoo10.lab.local:8443/oo/login/login-form
https://hpcsa.lab.local:8444/csa/login
https://hpcsa.lab.local:8089/org/CSA_CONSUMER
You should be able to make out from the names above which appliances (OO/CSA/Marketplace) I'm referring to. The demo appliance will probably make it easier with a single IP or Hostname.

Now in CSA get to the logon screen (the second url above):
The view below shows CSA 4.2 which looks slightly different from 4.1.

Then go to Providers and select VMware vCenter on the left and click Create on the bottom right:

Enter the information for your vCenter as shown, the Service Access Point and appropriate account to access vCenter is required. I've used the VMware SSO account but an AD one is also viable, best create one specifically for CSA with a long password but for a Lab, keep it simple! Change the image if desired, I don't think the consumers ever see it though. Now click on the Create button and then select the new Provider entry. Edit the DATACENTERNAME property (Edit button on the far right)and match the value to your Datacenter in vCenter.
 
 
 
I'm sure there are other properties we could define here to make life easier but for now this is all that's required and was enough for me to stand up a VM which is a good enough starting point. If you look under components you'll see there are two Topology Components pre-defined and we can use them in our Design.

Next go to the top level menus again and select Designs, Topology, Designer. Click Create and enter a name for the Service Design and decide a starting version number

You can leave Tags alone on the next screen and select an appropriate icon and Click Finish. This will bring you into the Editor where we will place our two components and configure them. Click an empty space in the editor and you will see a cursor with a plus sign beside it. The Create Node window pops up and you can scroll down to select vCenter Server and provide a new name for this item if you wish. The Properties on the right now need to be serviced. The ones we HAVE to modify are shown with a red asterix on them. The values I used are as follows (Change the Template and Customization Spec to your Lab values):

Name: vCenter Server
cpuCount: 1 (Select Modifiable during service creation)
memorySize: 4096 (Select Modifiable during service creation)
vmTemplateReference: 2012R2 Std Template
vmNamePrefix: Cloud-
customizationSpec: Server 2012 - no domain
vmFolder: Cloud
username:
password:
privateKey:
 


Next click into the designer to add a second component "vCenter Network Interface", a little to the left - 1 square or so away and enter the properties below (Change the Port Group name to your Labs one):

Name: vCenter Network Interface 1
portGroupName: VM Network
networkInterfaceType: VmxNet3


Now we need to link the two objects. Move them so they are 1 square apart if they are not already and if you hover over the middle left of the Network property you'll see a clear circle. Click on this and hold the left mouse button while moving over to the corresponding circle on the middle right of the server object, let go of the mouse button to link the two up. So we've two components, both are needed or the server won't get on the network until we've joined them up. With everything connected you should have no Errors or Validation Errors anywhere in this view. Click Save.

Next go back to Overview and Click Publish and Click Yes to confirm. As it says you can't edit this afterwards, for further modifications you would have to make a new version and go from there.

Let's do a test run and see how it operates (and if it works!). Fill out the Modifiable Properties with other values if you wish or just click Finish to execute it. Click View. Keep an eye on HP OO under Run Management and also vCenter itself and you'll see if the VM actually gets deployed.
If all goes well you'll see a Cloning Operation commencing and you'll know that the vCenter Provider connection is good and if your Design stands up or not. Give it time to apply Customizations so it could take around 12-15 minutes based on my Lab, be patient!! I've also a DHCP server running so it will get an IP Address.
Click Cancel to Undeploy the VM and you're done! That takes a lot less time (16 seconds in my lab!)You can still do test runs of earlier versions of the Design but you have to select the exact version by clicking on the version number when selecting the Design from the list. (Clicking 1.0.2 below would select that version and you could do a test Run against it for comparison if the later one failed).
You can also go deeper into OO to see the flow steps and if any errors / failure occurred, where. I didn't select the correct network driver the first time - I entered "VMXNET 3" as it's listed in the VM properties in VMware but OO doesn't recognize that as shown below:


While we have selected Publish against this Design, it's not actually visible to anyone yet, you also have to publish an Offering which references that Design. This is where you assign costs, who can gets to see it, approval flows and so on. We'll cover that in the next Post!

Note: Observe the names of some of the Properties such as "portGroupname" or "cpuCount". See where the capital is, pay attention to it as if creating custom flows this becomes critical!

The vCenter task below is shown below for reference:
Notice the VM Name? It also appeared in my "Cloud" VM Folder which was nice! The VM got a DHCP IP Address but the random name could be an issue, it is unique but could the NetBIOS name be friendlier? Otherwise a successful, pingeable first run!
















Wednesday 20 May 2015

HP Cloud Service Automation - Part 1

HP Cloud Service Automation - Part 1


I've been working with HP OO & HP CSA as part of HP CloudSystem 8.1. They form an integral part of the Catalog function that tells Openstack and VMware what to produce. Understanding these components is crucial to developing a good Catalog but they are not easy products to get to grips with!

While you can deploy the whole CloudSystem suite to get at the contained OO / CSA products, they are also available as a separate bundled appliance for trial purposes.
http://www8.hp.com/us/en/software-solutions/server-automation-software/try-now.html

I've been lucky enough to get my hands on the windows versions and used a SQL database. I've taken some notes in case you head down this road that will save you some time:

HP OO 10.20 Deployed - SQL 2014 not currently supported so I tested with SQL 2012 without issue. The Database needs a few specific advanced settings:
ALLOW_SNAPSHOT_ISOLATION ON
READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT ON
AUTO_CREATE_STATISTICS ON
AUTO_SHRINK OFF

Use only the following database collation for English:
English: SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CS_AS

There was a patch for HP OO to 10.21 but it prevented me integrating CSA 4.2 and I'd to roll back. Just in case you want to try this for some reason (!) the upgrade is as follows:

Place extracted upgrade folder into the install path:
E:\Program Files\Hewlett-Packard\HP Operations Orchestration\upgrade\10.21.0001\bin
Run the apply-upgrade.bat as admin just in case and press y (there is also a rollback file if needed)

There is a community edition of HP OO which is free but limited to 100 flows a month but this will NOT integrate with CSA as I found out!

The HP Live Network below contains a link to the HP OO community edition
https://hpln.hp.com/group/operations-orchestration
The site above also has links to download updated content packs that you can import into HP OO. Or you can have some fun creating your own with OO Studio from CloudSystem!

Note: The trial version below seems to be that same community edition so try the appliance link at the top of this post above:
http://www8.hp.com/us/en/software-solutions/operations-orchestration-it-process-automation/try-now.html

I'm not sure the CSA windows software is available easily, it's easier for me to work with but again the appliance seems to bundle both OO & CSA but its Linux. From my deployment, I didn't install the feature .NET 3.51 before installing and the CSA portal worked fine but the Marketplace didn't. I did get an error about .Net being missing but the install completed anyway so after enabling this feature I uninstalled and reinstalled CSA and Marketplace started working fine.

The versions in CloudSystem 8.1 are HP Operations Orchestration 10.10 and Cloud Service Automation 4.10 for reference.

Currently HP OO is up to 10.21 and CSA 4.20 so the Windows versions and screenshots may look a bit different in later blogs.

So what use is HP OO & CSA without Openstack and the rest of CloudSystem? Well, it's still very useful software and was around long before CloudSystem took advantage of it. It can talk to Active Directory, Deploy VMs to Amazon Cloud, deploy applications and lots more. The licensing terms in CloudSystem need to be understood however so don't go running off and plugging it into anything - talk to your HP Sales Rep to understand how this operates in a Corporate setting. I'm just focused on learning for myself in a small Lab and by connecting CSA directly to VMware vCenter I can still request VMs and then mess with the Catalog settings to understand how the flows in OO work and see when they break. Using this I can get to understand items like:
  • Pricing
  • Approvals
  • Publishing
  • Look and Feel of different options (including documents and screenshots with offerings)
  • How to present choices to customers and reflect those choices in the VM that is built
  • Configure LDAP integration
  • Try different Providers and Content Packs and develop custom ones in OO Studio
  • How versioning works with Designs vs Offerings - when you have to start from scratch!
  • Changing options after a VM is deployed (Operational changes)
  • Topology vs Sequence Designer
These are just a few of the things I feel need to be understood when designing a good Catalog. The customer will of course have definite ideas also so you can start by building something basic, show it to the customer and then see how their operational experience shapes the solution. It may impact things such as:
  • VM naming conventions (VM name vs GUID shown in hypervisor which will confuse VMware admins if they haven't used Cloud systems before)
  • Choices for CPU, Ram, Disk, Network - how are these presented? How many options do you offer? How do you prevent someone choosing unreasonable virtual hardware?!
  • Do you have 1 VM per subscription or allow multiple instances, how does VM name generation work in that situation? Can you search for VM names easily in CSA afterwards when VMs are nested below single subscriptions?
There is a lot to decide in advance with Clouds, all the choices have to be carefully thought out. I hope to show some of those choices in later posts as it's the "meat & gravy" of a Cloud solution after the deployment is completed. Sometimes it's fun, other times frustrating but as you succeed in getting things to work it increases your confidence but remember that those skills may be product specific. Keeping Openstack & Hypervisor skills is very important as they are more likely to stand to you long-term as your career and experience develops.

One document I recommend you read is the concepts guide below:
https://docs.hpcloud.com/automation/
Try the link below but it may change as new versions are released:
http://support.openview.hp.com/selfsolve/document/KM01061671/binary/CSA_410_Concepts_Guide.pdf

So, there we leave it. I'll show you a basic catalog in the next post and the simpler options you can configure in CSA.



Monday 18 May 2015

vCenter 6.0 C# Performance Overview Missing?!

vCenter 6.0 C# Performance Overview Missing?!

Just noticed something when I was on a call with a colleague and wanted to talk him through some performance spot checks. He was using vCenter 5.1, I was on vCenter 6.0. I went to view the performance information in the older C# client side by side when I noticed that the Overview option was missing. Remember the nice one that gave you a summary? Gone!! Vanished!!

Well, you've to head to the Web Client now it seems, it's there. To be expected but it would have been nicer if they left the old C# client views alone!! I'm sure you'll spot other things vanishing in the future as this client is left behind but that one surprised me!