HOW IT WORKS?
Introduction
The MyWorld Cloud Business Management Software from Fort Technologies provides complete lifecycle management of cloud based IT environments in both a datacenter or enterprise environment. The software consists of five main components. These are:
• Web based self service portal for customer/project management
• Drag and drop environment designer to design & price complete IT environments
• Provisioning engine to provision servers, storage, network and monitoring
• MyWorld environment management console with integrated monitoring and ticketing
• Web based administration tool to manage the integration with the underlying infrastructure
Architecture
The core of the software consists of a three tier Java application, Apache, Tomcat, and MySQL which is installed onto a Linux host within your infrastructure, together with a number of automation scripts. The Linux host may be virtual or physical, with an optional secondary standby host. The software is then configured to integrate with your virtualised infrastructure and communicates with the various hypervisors such as VMware, Xen, KVM or HyperV to provision virtual machines and storage. It also integrates with your network to automatically provision the required networking services such as VLAN, QOS and Firewall policies and to configure monitoring of the environments as they are provisioned.
The default integrated ticketing (RT) and monitoring (Nagios) are implemented as modules and may be unplugged and replaced with other modules to integrate with other existing ticketing and monitoring services. Integrating internally or externally provided SaaS is also handled in a modular fashion and may be extended with additional modules to allow new services to be integrated. SaaS integration examples include online backup and email filtering.
Workflow
A user logs onto the portal to manage customer details and to optionally set the pricing margin on a per customer basis. The portal also allows billing information to be viewed for those environments which have already been provisioned. Double clicking on a customer opens the Drag and Drop designer tool, which has a library of infrastructure components, including servers, network, storage, firewalls and applications, as well as CPU, RAM, Disks space and both OS and application licences. The user builds up their environment by dragging and dropping the required components into the central palette and configuring each component to the required specification, including configuring licences. The price is displayed in real time on the right of the palette as the environment is designed. Having designed their environment, the user may save the design for future provisioning or to change the environment at a later date, such as having obtained sign off on the design and cost.
Clicking ‘Build’ sends the design to the provisioning engine. The provisioning engine takes the design and splits it up into component types, such as servers, network and storage and builds the individual components into a complete environment by interfacing with the underlying virtualised infrastructure via the infrastructure APIs and also via various automation scripts created by Fort Technologies. The provisioning engine also configures the monitoring system to begin to monitor and collect statistics from the newly created environment. Once provisioned, the user receives their login credentials to the environment. They may view the environment in the MyWorld management console, which opens in a separate window, which includes an active network map which mirrors that which the user created in the designer and which enables the user to click on a server to login and power up and down a server. The management console also shows per server statistics such as CPU, RAM and disk space usage.
The user may choose to edit their environment from within the MyWorld Management console which will open the designer and populate it with the existing environment which can then be changed. Only those components which are changed within the designer will be touched by provisioning, such as adding Disk space, changing firewalls rules etc may be performed hot, while others such as changing the CPU or RAM on a server will require a reboot of that particular server. The user may then return to the partner portal to view a wrapped up high level ‘traffic light’ monitoring view of all of their active environments, create and view support ticket status and manage their customers.
