Heterogeneous & Hybrid Environments

Heterogeneous environments

You or your customers may have physical servers installed onsite or in the datacenter. These physical servers may be running workloads which are not suitable for virtualisation, such as large database clusters or running legacy OS or Applications, but you want a single management view of both your physical and virtualised infrastructure.  Fort’s MyWorld Cloud Management software supports the addition of physical servers into an environment which is being created using the ‘drag & drop’ designer.

This is enabled by adding a ‘physical switch’ to the environment from the designer library which indicates that servers attached to this switch are physical. The application will prompt for the IP address of the physical server and if monitoring is to be enabled for the host. Installing the monitoring agent on the physical host will enable both monitoring and statistics for the host to be collected and displayed in the MyWorld console view.

In the example above there are three servers, two physical and one virtual. The two physical servers, one Solaris and one CentOS, are shown on the left of the network map and are homed on the physical switch. The virtual host, also CentOS, is shown on the right of the network map. The monitoring agent has been installed on the physical host and the status and statistics for the physical Solaris host are shown on the tab on the right hand side of the screen shot.

Note that the virtual CentOS host has both the ‘Server Properties’ and ‘Power Button’ showing on the icon in the network map indicating that this host is virtual and can be reconfigured by clicking the ‘Edit Environment’ button on the top toolbar. Reconfiguring the physical hosts will of course require physical access to the hosts and adding/removing physical components.

Clicking on the ‘Login’ button on the icon of any of the servers on the network map, whether physical or virtual, will launch a login session to that server.

Hybrid environments

MyWorld also supports Hybrid environments, where some of the servers are on premise and some are remote in the Cloud. There are two scenarios for a hybrid environment.

First is where the MyWorld software is deployed in the datacenter and managing virtualised infrastructure within the datacenter, but there are also physical on premise hosts which are part of the overall environment. These hosts could be AD server replicas for example.  During the design of an environment, a physical switch may be added to the environment and the reachable IP address(es) of the physical server(s) entered. Using site to site VPN between the on premise and datacenter environments allows these IP addresses to be none routable private addresses if required. Only those ports required for login, monitoring and any application data traffic need to be opened between the environments. Of course an existing environment which has already been provisioned in the datacenter may be edited within the designer in order to add the on premise servers.

Second is where there is virtualised infrastructure both on premise and in the remote datacenter. A single instance of the Fort MyWorld software can be deployed to manage both these infrastructures providing there is network connectivity between the two infrastructures. MyWorld supports defining multiple datacenter instances and each instance may itself be multihypervisor. In a primary/secondary installation of the MyWorld software the primary and secondary servers may be located at different sites for resilience.

In the above graphic, MyWorld is managing both on premise and datacenter virtualised infrastructure. Of course this configuration can also be used to manage multiple remote datacenters or multiple instances within the one datacenter, such as might be used to offer multiple tenants their own dedicated virtualised infrastructure, but centrally managed.

Note that the provisioning of a server type which is homed on remote infrastructure to local infrastructure is not currently directly supported. It can however be achieved by copying the base clone from the remote infrastructure to the local infrastructure and configuring MyWorld to use the local copy for local deployments and the remote copy for remote deployments.