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.