DEPLOY SERVICES FASTER WITH DELL ACTIVE SYSTEM MANAGER OCTOBER 2015 A PRINCIPLED TECHNOLOGIES TEST REPORT Commissioned by Dell Inc. Deploying IT services with an inefficient management solution can be a tedious process. Repeating the same set of steps multiple times to deploy services or navigate several different interfaces demands your system administrator’s time and attention to avoid making costly mistakes. This detracts from time your admin could spend streamlining IT processes and providing support for your staff—but it doesn’t have to be this way. By selecting an efficient automated system manager like Dell Active System Manager (ASM), your administrator can eliminate unnecessary time spent completing repetitive tasks and address more pressing matters within your organization. In the Principled Technologies datacenter, we found that using Dell Active System Manager required less administrative time and fewer steps to deploy services such as VMware® clusters when compared to a similar Lenovo management solution. Dell ASM let us deploy a new VMware vSphere® service in just eight steps. Deploying the equivalent service with XClarity Administrator involved significantly more manual steps, requiring an additional 133 steps through multiple interfaces to complete an equivalent deployment. Dell ASM makes the routine and complex deployment tasks we tested easier, allowing administrators to provision and deploy servers and blades with less effort and time compared to Lenovo XClarity Administrator.
21
Embed
Deploy services faster with Dell Active System Manager...Lenovo XClarity Administrator required opening two additional management interfaces—VMware vCenter™ and Storwize® V7000
This document is posted to help you gain knowledge. Please leave a comment to let me know what you think about it! Share it to your friends and learn new things together.
Transcript
DEPLOY SERVICES FASTER WITH DELL ACTIVE SYSTEM MANAGER
OCTOBER 2015
A PRINCIPLED TECHNOLOGIES TEST REPORT Commissioned by Dell Inc.
Deploying IT services with an inefficient management solution can be a tedious
process. Repeating the same set of steps multiple times to deploy services or navigate
several different interfaces demands your system administrator’s time and attention to
avoid making costly mistakes. This detracts from time your admin could spend
streamlining IT processes and providing support for your staff—but it doesn’t have to be
this way. By selecting an efficient automated system manager like Dell Active System
Manager (ASM), your administrator can eliminate unnecessary time spent completing
repetitive tasks and address more pressing matters within your organization.
In the Principled Technologies datacenter, we found that using Dell Active
System Manager required less administrative time and fewer steps to deploy services
such as VMware® clusters when compared to a similar Lenovo management solution.
Dell ASM let us deploy a new VMware vSphere® service in just eight steps.
Deploying the equivalent service with XClarity Administrator involved significantly more
manual steps, requiring an additional 133 steps through multiple interfaces to complete
an equivalent deployment. Dell ASM makes the routine and complex deployment tasks
we tested easier, allowing administrators to provision and deploy servers and blades
with less effort and time compared to Lenovo XClarity Administrator.
Deploy services faster with Dell Active System Manager
A “one and done” approach to deployment
Automation can save significant administrator time in the datacenter by
reducing the number of tedious, repetitive tasks required to complete a service
deployment such as a vSphere cluster deployment. Dell ASM comes with built-in
templates you can use to customize a service to meet your specific needs. While Dell
ASM required administrator time and effort to configure the initial deployment
templates, administrators can later use these templates repeatedly to deploy services
with only a few steps. This ensures a consistent deployment process over time. XClarity
Administrator lacks this template feature, which means you will have to repeat the
deployment process from square one for each deployment, which can also increase
your risk for variation and human error. With Dell ASM, once the template is created,
you significantly reduce the amount of duplicate steps required to deploy services
within your infrastructure.
In our representative service deployment, we used Dell ASM to create a ready-
to-host VMware vSphere High Availability, Distributed Resource Scheduler (HA/DRS)
cluster (see Appendix A for hardware details) by using the template editor. This tool in
Dell ASM can simplify the individual configuration of both virtual and physical
components. As Figure 1 shows, the vSphere cluster is represented along with physical
server and storage resources. Administrators can publish and deploy templates as
services, and add storage, servers, clusters, VMs, and applications through this single
interface, with additional configuration options made available by clicking on each
resource.
A Principled Technologies test report 4
Deploy services faster with Dell Active System Manager
Figure 1: Creating and editing a service template with the template editor in Dell ASM.
Save administrator time and steps
After creating a template for our own environment, it took only eight steps and
22 seconds of administrator time to deploy the cluster on our chassis. Dell ASM
automatically designated networking resources, including management and OS IP
addresses, and installed the hypervisor OS (ESXi™ 5.5) without any additional
administrative time or steps. By comparison, Lenovo XClarity Administrator required
significantly more steps and time to complete the same tasks since it lacked the
templating features of Dell ASM.
Figure 2 shows the number of steps to deploy the same service on both
solutions. An administrator using Dell ASM was able to deploy the VMware HA/DRS
cluster with 94.33 percent fewer steps than an administrator using XClarity
Administrator.
A Principled Technologies test report 5
Deploy services faster with Dell Active System Manager
Figure 2: Dell ASM cut the number of steps to deliver a VMware vSphere service by 133 steps – 94.33 percent fewer steps – compared to the XClarity Administrator solution.
Figure 4 shows the difference in administrator time required to deploy a
VMware vSphere HA/DRS cluster from each solution. An administrator using Dell ASM
deployed a VMware HA/DRS cluster in 96.98 percent less time than it took to perform
the same task with Lenovo XClarity Administrator.
Figure 3: An administrator using Dell ASM took 96.98 percent less time deploying a VMware vSphere cluster compared to using XClarity Administrator.
It is also worth noting that in our tests, these time and steps savings are for a
single deployment. In an environment where the same services must be deployed
multiple times, you could expect the time and steps savings to multiply accordingly.
With Dell ASM, deploying a VMware HA/DRS cluster can be done in the same 8 steps
and 22 seconds of administrator time once the template is created. By contrast, the
A Principled Technologies test report 6
Deploy services faster with Dell Active System Manager
process must be done manually from scratch on Lenovo XClarity Administrator
regardless of how many times the same process must be repeated.
CONCLUSION With new automation tools, tying up your administrator’s time with repetitive
processes can become a thing of the past. Our tests showed how Dell ASM, with the
ability to build deployment templates, can save significant administrator time and steps
compared to a solution that lacks these features. In an age where business IT demands
grow rapidly, providing administrators with the right tools to manage their virtualized
infrastructure is critical for keeping your datacenter running efficiently.
A Principled Technologies test report 7
Deploy services faster with Dell Active System Manager
APPENDIX A – SYSTEM CONFIGURATION INFORMATION Figures 4 and 5 provide detailed configuration information for the hardware we used in our tests.
Then click Next. Select Create one or more new pools.
Type your pool name and click Finish.
When the RAID is finished creating, click Close.
Click Hosts.
Click Create Host.
Click iSCSI Host.
Fill out the host name, type the IQN of the first host, and click Add Port to List.
Click Create Host.
When the Create Host task has completed, click Close.
Click Create Host.
A Principled Technologies test report 20
Deploy services faster with Dell Active System Manager
Click iSCSI Host.
Fill out the host name, type the IQN of the second host, and click Add Port to List.
Click Create Host.
When the Create Host task has completed, click Close.
Click on Volumes.
Click Create Volume.
In Create Volume, select Generic, type the size of your volume, and click Create and Map to Host.
Click Continue.
In Modify Host Mappings, choose your first host.
Click Apply.
Choose your second host.
Click Apply.
Accept the warning about multiple hosts.
Click Close.
Adding iSCSI storage to the cluster
Navigate to your infrastructure’s existing VMware vCenter web client.
Provide the necessary login credentials, and click Login.
Select Hosts & Clusters.
Expand the left pane and click on the first host.
Click Manage.
Click Storage.
Click Targets.
Click Add.
In Add Send Target Server, type the IP address of your iSCSI storage and click OK.
Click Rescan Storage.
Click OK.
Right-click on your host and select Storage New Datastore.
Select VMFS and click Next.
Name your datastore, select your iSCSI storage, and click Next.
Select VMFS 5 and click Next.
In Partition configuration, select your datastore size and click Next.
Review your datastore and click Finish.
In the left pane, click on the second host.
Click on your iSCSI adapter.
Click Targets.
Click Add.
In Add Send Target Server, type the IP address of your iSCSI storage and click OK.
Click Rescan Storage.
Click OK.
A Principled Technologies test report 21
Deploy services faster with Dell Active System Manager
ABOUT PRINCIPLED TECHNOLOGIES
Principled Technologies, Inc. 1007 Slater Road, Suite 300 Durham, NC, 27703 www.principledtechnologies.com
We provide industry-leading technology assessment and fact-based marketing services. We bring to every assignment extensive experience with and expertise in all aspects of technology testing and analysis, from researching new technologies, to developing new methodologies, to testing with existing and new tools. When the assessment is complete, we know how to present the results to a broad range of target audiences. We provide our clients with the materials they need, from market-focused data to use in their own collateral to custom sales aids, such as test reports, performance assessments, and white papers. Every document reflects the results of our trusted independent analysis. We provide customized services that focus on our clients’ individual requirements. Whether the technology involves hardware, software, Web sites, or services, we offer the experience, expertise, and tools to help our clients assess how it will fare against its competition, its performance, its market readiness, and its quality and reliability. Our founders, Mark L. Van Name and Bill Catchings, have worked together in technology assessment for over 20 years. As journalists, they published over a thousand articles on a wide array of technology subjects. They created and led the Ziff-Davis Benchmark Operation, which developed such industry-standard benchmarks as Ziff Davis Media’s Winstone and WebBench. They founded and led eTesting Labs, and after the acquisition of that company by Lionbridge Technologies were the head and CTO of VeriTest.
Principled Technologies is a registered trademark of Principled Technologies, Inc. All other product names are the trademarks of their respective owners.
Disclaimer of Warranties; Limitation of Liability: PRINCIPLED TECHNOLOGIES, INC. HAS MADE REASONABLE EFFORTS TO ENSURE THE ACCURACY AND VALIDITY OF ITS TESTING, HOWEVER, PRINCIPLED TECHNOLOGIES, INC. SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, RELATING TO THE TEST RESULTS AND ANALYSIS, THEIR ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS OR QUALITY, INCLUDING ANY IMPLIED WARRANTY OF FITNESS FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE. ALL PERSONS OR ENTITIES RELYING ON THE RESULTS OF ANY TESTING DO SO AT THEIR OWN RISK, AND AGREE THAT PRINCIPLED TECHNOLOGIES, INC., ITS EMPLOYEES AND ITS SUBCONTRACTORS SHALL HAVE NO LIABILITY WHATSOEVER FROM ANY CLAIM OF LOSS OR DAMAGE ON ACCOUNT OF ANY ALLEGED ERROR OR DEFECT IN ANY TESTING PROCEDURE OR RESULT. IN NO EVENT SHALL PRINCIPLED TECHNOLOGIES, INC. BE LIABLE FOR INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES IN CONNECTION WITH ITS TESTING, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. IN NO EVENT SHALL PRINCIPLED TECHNOLOGIES, INC.’S LIABILITY, INCLUDING FOR DIRECT DAMAGES, EXCEED THE AMOUNTS PAID IN CONNECTION WITH PRINCIPLED TECHNOLOGIES, INC.’S TESTING. CUSTOMER’S SOLE AND EXCLUSIVE REMEDIES ARE AS SET FORTH HEREIN.