Customer Concern

The customer engaged Rabun Enterprise Solutions to architect, implement, and develop a self-service solution allowing hundreds of engineers and developers the ability to deploy virtual machines and utilize a configuration management tool to manage day-1 and day-2 elements for the virtual machines and the applications that run on top of the VM.

The customer had 10 data centers around the globe and needed a secure deployment methodology that would scale to more datacenters in the future. The customer also wanted ease of deployment and upgrades with a limited set of engineers to manage the environment.  The target consumers of the deployment was around 400 developers, engineers, and administrators. 

Customer Requirements

The customer required a cloud management platform that would include centralized logging, metrics and monitoring, IaaS deployment, and configuration management.

In order to meet CIS requirements, the customer required a hardened set of virtual machine templates and a tool that would allow the consumers to manage upgrades and patching.

Key Target Issues

• Cloud Management Platform

• Security Compliance

• Infrastructure Architecture

Challenges

• Challenging performance and provisioning service level agreement.

• Customer had limited technical experience deploying and maintaining a platform of this magnitude. 

Solutions

VMware vCenter, ESXi

After reviewing the reference architecture and documenting final deployment architecture, the team implemented vSphere vCenter and ESXi.  This scale-out architecture allowed the customer to scale-out or scale-up as needed while having a solid upgrade path. The vSphere foundation was the first building block of the future automation and virtualized management.

VMware vRealize Automation and Salt Stack Config with Secops

Our engineering team followed the VMware vRealize reference architecture during the deployment and utilized salt stack config and secops for configuration management, security compliance, and patch management.

VMware vRealize Operations and Log Insight

RES then deployed vRealize Operations and Log Insight to provide a centralized dashboard for metrics and a centralized reporting and alerting platform for logs. The vRealize Operations deployment allowed the team to monitor and manage the 10 datacenters and provide self-service capabilities to the 400 technology users.

We were able to implement this project in three phases. Phase one consisted of designing and deploying the infrastructure and virtualization software. This included deploying the physical  hardware: servers, networking equipment, and storage arrays and storage fabric.  Once the physical implementation was completed, the virtualization software was installed and the hardware was configured.

Phase two consisted of deploying the cloud management software.  This phase included installing and configuring: vRealize Automation, vRealize Operations, vRealize Log Insight, and Salt Stack Config.  Once the cloud management platform was deployed, then the configuration tasks started.

Phase three consisted of creating blueprints, dashboards, alerts, and salt state configurations.  The goal was to create IaaS blueprints to provision Linux and Windows systems while integrating with Redhat Satellite, Microsoft SCCM, Infoblox, and Salt Stack Config.  Once the new system was deployed, then Salt Stack Config was used to maintain the configuration of the system.

Conclusion

This extensive deployment allowed the customer to focus on its core competencies of developing software for customers as well as provide a hosted platform for customers who wanted the software to be managed.

They now are able to accomplish the provisioning process in 20 minutes, which previously took 8-10 weeks. This accelerated utilization also allowed the customer to meet security compliance and patching requirements on an on-going basis.