Context

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•   Deployment Management
  •   Plan Deployment Program

Details

The IBM® Tivoli® Provisioning Manager product is an event driven automated provisioning solution for both corporate and Internet data centers that provides the ability to automate various elements within the provisioning process. The product coordinates data center assets to provision based on pre-defined business processes.

Prior to planning a release rollout, Tivoli Provisioning Manager must be populated with information that describes the environment being managed. To achieve this, Tivoli Provisioning Manager gives data center administrators the ability to model their data center infrastructure environments. Included within this model are physical assets (for example, servers, routers, switches, and load balancers), logical assets (software, IP subnets, and VLANS) and the relationships between them. After population of this information is complete, it is possible to execute a variety of automations against this dataset that impact change on that particular device.

Changes can range anywhere from a configuration change to a hardware element change within a server, to the installation of software on a particular endpoint. Regardless of the type of change, the method by which these changes are enacted (that is, the recipe for these changes) are encapsulated within a concept called workflows .

A workflow is a simple script-like program with a number of constructs that is used to manage a data center. It can be comprised of a number of base steps intended to carry out a specific task, or include a large number of steps that includes other workflows. Tivoli Provisioning Manager data center model queries and scripts are run on target machines. For example, modification to data center infrastructure (route changes, VLAN assignments), configuration and allocation of servers (software installation, configuration), and specific command actions (reboot server, power off device, install image) can all be accomplished using workflows. In this way, workflows make it possible to build a powerful library of reusable processes that can be assembled to meet any data center process requirement.

Tivoli Provisioning Manager workflows allow data center administrators and operators to successfully plan a release rollout automation (or action) against a specific device. These actions can be executed in response to a specific condition occurring in real-time, based on a schedule, or executed at run-time through manual administrator intervention.

Figure 1 : An example of a Tivoli Provisioning Manager workflow.

By referencing information stored within the data center model (DCM), which is the database that contains the modeled infrastructure component information and represents the data center assets, workflows provide an intuitive and simple way to carry out administrative tasks.

Workflows allow administrators to encapsulate future actions to be carried out across the infrastructure into a recipe format using data gleaned from the data center model. Rollback scripts, precautions, and validity checking are a few of the capabilities that are offered within workflows to provide successful data and asset protection. By carefully building safe release rollout plans, should an error occur during execution of the automation, safeguards are put in place to gracefully handle any errors that might result.

Following successful completion of the workflow procedure, the data center model is updated to reflect the change against the infrastructure. Operators and administrators are able to view the changes using the Web management console interface. Execution results are stored within event logs, which provides a historical audit trail of previous workflow executions.

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