Hybrid Cloud for Development and Testing with VMware vcloud Air

Transcription

1 Hybrid Cloud for Development and Testing with VMware vcloud Air January 2015 White paper

2 Introduction Organizations struggle to meet the demand for scalable and resilient infrastructure to develop and test applications. Developers feel the pain of waiting for infrastructure and of not having an exact replica of the production environment. IT is challenged with providing capacity on demand and with recreating complex multi-tier application environments for development and testing (dev/test). A growing number of organizations are consuming or considering cloud services to accelerate software dev/test cycles. Cloud services enable them to take advantage of on-demand capacity to deal with these key challenges: Limited IT resources force trade-offs in prioritizing projects. Unpredictable requirements for dev/test result in overpurchasing and underutilization. Lengthy purchasing and provisioning cycles for new infrastructure add time and cost to projects. Incompatible dev/test and production environments require workarounds that draw out timelines and raise the risk of errors. Enable Agile Development VMware vcloud Air uniquely addresses these challenges with a highly available and secure platform that bridges the divide between test and production environments. Built on VMware vsphere, vcloud Air delivers a production-ready cloud that is 100 percent compatible with your onsite vsphere environment. A common platform provides several advantages that enable you to remove budget barriers, improve testing accuracy, and accelerate time to production. Remove Budget Barriers IT has become a critical enabler of a company s success. Demand for IT resources to support the business is ever-increasing, causing challenges in balancing dynamic capacity requirements with managing unused onsite capacity and reducing costs. vcloud Air enables you to provision the capacity you need on any scale while ensuring that your test environments are synchronized to production standards. You can recreate the same environment for integration testing, user acceptance testing, and system testing while optimizing resource allocation by optionally overcommitting CPU and RAM just as you can with vsphere. You can stand up and tear down dev/test environments and resize dynamically without interruptions. And with our vcloud Air Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand service, you pay only for what you use, with meter-by-minute billing to avoid overpurchasing and underutilization. Improve Testing Accuracy Ideally, dev/test environments replicate production environments for optimal test effectiveness and provide seamless portability of workloads between test and production. A single unified hybrid platform for development, testing, and delivery of applications eliminates inconsistencies that cause application errors, service disruptions, and project delays. With vcloud Air, you can migrate virtual machines and vsphere vapps from your onsite vsphere environment with no changes or conversions required using VMware vcloud Connector. vcloud Air is resilient for any application and offers built-in capacity for high availability. You can further improve performance, minimize outages, and optimize resources using familiar vsphere features including vsphere High Availability, vsphere vmotion, and vsphere Storage vmotion. Accelerate Time to Production IT s ability to rapidly provision infrastructure for dev/test can greatly impact how fast a business can launch a new application or service. vcloud Air enables you to jump-start your efforts by publishing IT-approved virtual machine and vapp templates using vcloud Connector. Using tools such as VMware vrealize Automation, you can create reusable blueprints of application components that you can deploy in either your private data center or vcloud Air. By using familiar VMware tools and processes, you can minimize the time required to learn new tools and skills, automate development life cycles, and achieve faster rollout of applications to production. Technical White paper / 2

3 Common Uses Many organizations are realizing that moving dev/test to hybrid cloud is a cost-effective way to get on-demand capacity for a limited time. To accelerate your adoption of hybrid cloud, consider these top four common ways to get started by developing and testing applications with vcloud Air. Test New Packaged Applications Business users often want to evaluate applications that they believe will add value to the business. But to an IT infrastructure team, every new application introduces potential risks to performance, security, and compliance of the production infrastructure. Hybrid cloud provides a low-risk and cost-effective way to experiment with new packaged applications. Applications can be set up on vcloud Air for business teams to evaluate with no impact on the production environment. You can enable your users with on-demand cloud capacity for testing in an environment built on the same vsphere foundation as your production environment. If the project doesn t meet your requirements, you incur no risks and waste no investment in additional infrastructure. You simply decommission the virtual machines in vcloud Air. If the project succeeds, you can easily move the application into production in-house without change and can rest assured that it will perform exactly as it did in vcloud Air. Test Upgrades of Existing Applications The relentless pace of application upgrades consumes a significant and unpredictable share of overall IT resources. This process can inhibit the ability of IT to allocate resources to new, innovative projects. Scalable hybrid cloud infrastructure eliminates the fixed overhead needed to accommodate application upgrade cycles. With vcloud Air, you can test application upgrades in an isolated cloud environment without posing any risk to your production applications or infrastructure. Simply clone production applications, migrate to vcloud Air, verify the upgrade, and port the application back to your onsite environment with no additional testing. Bluefin Solutions Saves Weeks to Months in Project Development Time Bluefin Solutions, a global consultancy specializing in SAP implementations, needed to quickly move SAP applications from the test and development stage in the public cloud to a live environment in a private cloud onsite. It was building these systems in Amazon Web Services, but when the development-and-test stage was complete, the team had to entirely rebuild them to move them back onsite replicating days, weeks, or even months of work. With vcloud Air, the team can now move data and applications between private and public environments seamlessly, using existing tools and processes. The vcloud Air interface is similar to their existing VMware solutions, so the team knew how to work with the solution right away. They started the testing phase immediately, creating an image in the cloud and moving it back to their onsite VMware environment. After the test phase, the team created a virtual machine on their onsite system and started the migration to vcloud Air. No corruption or data loss occurred, and performance levels met the tough requirements of the SAP systems. They can now simply click a button to move the application to vcloud Air. And they don t need to rely on SAP consultants to help rebuild the applications onsite. vcloud Air enables Bluefin Solutions to complete customer proofs-of-concept in days rather than weeks and save months of man-hours on each SAP implementation project. Develop New In-House Applications Applications developed and tested in cloud environments that have not been fully vetted by IT might not run onsite without time-consuming evaluation and conversion processes and repeat testing before deployment in your onsite environment. With vcloud Air, you can start new development initiatives and sandbox projects in a cloud environment that is an extension of your current data center with all of the security, networking, and compliance policies used onsite. This approach gives developers the resources they need without compromising IT visibility, control, and interoperability to bring those workloads back to your data center if needed. Technical White paper / 3

4 Figure 1. Example of developing and testing in vcloud Air. Accelerate the Development Life Cycle The entire process of requesting and provisioning infrastructure can lead to long wait times and delays in software development. Key to developer productivity is on-demand access to properly configured compute and storage resources that are compatible with production environments. Using vcloud Air, you can accelerate your development life cycle and create a hybrid cloud DevOps environment using your favorite VMware and third-party tools. vcloud Air supports granular role-based access so you can broker virtual data center resources to your developers. With vrealize Automation, you can also create a selfservice portal for developers to enable service catalogs, resource reservations (CPU, memory, network, etc.), and role-based rights to user groups. Self-service provisioning satisfies developers with instant, on-demand capacity in a production-ready, compatible environment. Infrastructure and network settings shared between vcloud Air and your onsite vsphere environment reduce silos, enable workload portability, and streamline the software-development life cycle. Conclusion vcloud Air extends your onsite infrastructure to the cloud. With a common vsphere platform, vcloud Air delivers a truly hybrid write once, deliver anywhere platform for development and testing. Now you can manage your environments more efficiently across development, testing, and production and get applications to market faster. Learn more about using vcloud Air for dev/test with Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand. Visit Technical White paper / 4

5 VMware, Inc Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA USA Tel Fax Copyright 2015 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies. Item No: VMW-TWP-HYBRID-CLOUD-DEV-TEST-USLET /15