WHITE PAPER Leverage the full power of VMware with JAMS This whitepaper describes how JAMS integrates with the VMware ESX Server and the VMware Virtual Center Management Server. JAMS enables users to manage common VMware tasks such as power state management, inventory control, and performance reporting. Using JAMS to centrally control VMware tasks ensures seamless integration of VMware with key business requirements.
Table of Contents Introduction... 3 Today s Challenges... 3 Key Concerns Driving IT Management... 3 How the JAMS Scheduler Helps... 4 Highlights of JAMS for VMware... 5 Conclusion... 6 2
INTRODUCTION VMware environments face unique challenges in maximizing their return on investment. While virtualization is part of the effort to reduce costs and improve the efficiency of IT resources, control of VMware tasks is often left to manual intervention. Aligning VMware control with other key IT processes quickly becomes a necessity. TODAY S CHALLENGES While VMware only automates the virtual environment, business processes are still contained in both physical and virtual environments. VMware Management Tools cannot provide integration with IT processes running in the physical world. Gaining an enterprise wide view of dependencies and relationships between VMware tasks and other applications, databases, and platforms is not possible with VMware tools. KEY CONCERNS DRIVING IT MANAGEMENT With all of the above in mind, IT Managers must ensure that the job scheduling solution that they employ helps to address key business objectives. Contain costs and achieve efficiencies Align IT with the Business Meet Service Level Agreements (SLA s) Improve the Utilisation of the Existing Infrastructure Greening IT Workload Balancing Create Workflow Automation Regulatory Compliance and Security 3
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HOW THE JAMS SCHEDULER HELPS JAMS represents the next generation of batch scheduling and workload management solutions. By automating VMware tasks and other key processes in JAMS, IT managers have an enterprise wide view of all business processes. Listed below are VMware Tasks and IT issues that JAMS addresses: Power State Management - Power Virtual Machine On Power Virtual Machine Off Suspend Virtual Machine Reset Virtual Machine Reboot Virtual Machine Shutdown Virtual Machine Query Power State Reboot ESX Host Backup Management - Create Snapshot Revert to Snapshot Inventory Control - Create Virtual Machine Clone Virtual Machine Rename Virtual Machine Delete Virtual Machine Create Consistency Reports Performance Monitoring - Create Performance Reports BENEFITS OF USINGS JAMS Having the right resources available is critical to improving efficiency. Idle virtual machines consume resources long after their required processes have completed. JAMS allows users to integrate power management with key business processes. Application performance can be improved by automating the migration of business process to Virtual Machines where resources are available. Backup requirement are crucial for virtual machines. JAMS allows for VMware backups to be taken on both calendar and event driven schedules. Automating these crucial VMware tasks helps address the need for specific VMware expertise in increasingly complex environments. Managing virtual machine inventory is made easy with JAMS. Virtual machines can be cloned or deleted alongside the business processes they perform. This provides a true efficiency advantage over manually controlling VMware inventory. 5
Highlights of JAMS for VMware Jobs and processes that manage the operation of the virtual environment can be managed more easily by using a combination of PowerShell, JAMS and VMware Infrastructure Toolkit. This powerful combination gives IT a comprehensive toolset to monitor the health of the environment and dynamically change the environment in response to business requirements. VMware actions can be scheduled directly from JAMS. Users can schedule power, snapshot and configuration actions within the VMware ESX hypervisor as business conditions and workloads change. JAMS can trigger actions based on power and performance metrics from VMware. Users can trigger both VMware and application jobs based upon information on the power state and performance metrics of virtual machines. JAMS integrates with vcenter for workload automation. This integration enables JAMS to perform key vcenter tasks such as VM cloning, cold migration, hot migration, and storage migration. Users can automate and orchestrate server tasks that allow them to allocate VM host resources based on business process context and need. Resources can be directly applied to critical business process job schedules. If servers are being taxed to the point where applications slow down, JAMS jobs will run which will shut down a virtual machine on one physical server and start up the same virtual machine on a second server. As a result, organizations can automatically shift computing resource allocations by moving virtual machines in response to the ever-changing workload. As more virtual servers are added, JAMS can automatically add these new servers to existing Batch Queues in JAMS. As a result, the IT infrastructure operates at peak levels as JAMS continues to distribute the workload amongst your VMware servers. VMware users can also rely on JAMS to assist with production changes during off-hours since most organizations are opposed to making production environment changes during normal working hours. Using JAMS, virtual machine moves are easily scheduled and changed during off hours with the peace of mind that alerts will trigger if any problems arise. 6
CONCLUSION JAMS provides these capabilities in a straightforward and easy to implement solution. With a 20- year track record of success, JAMS is used by hundreds of organisations, both large and small including JPMorgan Chase, Kaiser Permanente, MillerCoors, Union Bank of California, The Hartford, and the US Postal Service. MVP Systems is a member of the VMware Technology Alliance Program. With more than 700 members worldwide, the VMware TAP program works with best-of-breed technology partners to provide them a comprehensive set of VMware technical and marketing services, support, tools and expertise to deliver enhanced value to joint customers. Regardless of the complexity or simplicity of your batch processing and automation requirements, JAMS can help. To find out more about how JAMS can help you, contact us at: MVP Systems Software, Inc. Corporate Headquarters: 2 Forest Park Drive Farmington, CT 06032 Phone (US & Canada) - 866.259.JAMS Phone (International) - 860.269.3112 Fax - 860.394.4044 Sales - sales@mvpsi.com Support - support@jamssupport.com http://www.jamsscheduler.com 7