Do you have IT applications that need to be ‘always on’? Are you looking for a simple yet comprehensive software-defined solution for managing high availability and disaster recovery (HADR), improving application performance, and reducing overall costs? If so, then you need InfoScale! Used by industry-leading organizations, Veritas InfoScale is one of the most trusted and advanced software-defined solutions available for managing your mission-critical applications and optimizing your IT environment – on-premises or in the cloud.
Veritas InfoScale Operations Manager, known as VIOM, provides a modern and intuitive user experience that helps you maximize resource utilization and optimize your data center assets by:
- Increasing operations efficiency
- Optimizing application performance and availability
- Reducing downtime for your IT services
- Centralizing visibility and control and maintaining compliance
VIOM also provides several APIs that make it easy to integrate with service management solutions. Let’s talk about how you can use VIOM and InfoScale to easily manage complex mission-critical applications.
VIOM Overview
VIOM is a centralized management solution that maximizes efficiency and visibility for your InfoScale managed applications and resources. Figure 1 shows an example of how VIOM works.
With VIOM, you get end to end visibility across your entire InfoScale environment, from the applications right down to the individual disks hosting your application data. This lets you manage your applications with confidence while ensuring high availability for your IT services. VIOM provides several other benefits, including:
- Accelerate operations and decision making with better visibility
- Eliminate user error and manual processes by automating operations
- Empower system administrators to manage complex tasks with minimal intervention
- Business and system-level reporting with proactive risk analysis
The VIOM API
VIOM provides an API that can be accessed using HTTPS with any standard HTTPS client. The interface provides the ability to query discovered data and manage user-defined attributes for InfoScale components. There are several types of APIs available:
- Metadata: provides details about InfoScale components
- Query: used to gather different attributes related to InfoScale components
- Update: used to update extended attributes of InfoScale components in the VIOM database
- Operations: used to perform InfoScale operations such as starting and stopping resources
Comprehensive reporting is always important for ensuring smooth operations with maximum service uptime. VIOM comes with a long list of pre-configured reports and you can also create customized reports that can be shared and distributed across the organization. Reports can be scheduled or run on-demand – easily setup in the VIOM user interface. You can also use the API to integrate directly with third-party reporting solutions. Want to know how much free storage space you have? You can easily create a report to show this, and it can be categorized in several ways (ex: based on hardware type) depending on what’s most useful for your business.
With the query and operational APIs, you can automate InfoScale management by pulling input information required for an operation using the query API and then executing that operation using the operations API. By automating common management tasks, you have the flexibility to focus on more innovative projects that help augment business value.
VIOM Features and Functionality
VIOM enables you to easily identify problems in your environment and find their root cause. However, it’s always better to be proactive vs. reactive so that you don’t have any problems in the first place. VIOM has tools to do exactly that. It helps you be proactive by:
- Inspecting your data center with built-in or custom health checks
- Providing information about high availability and DR readiness for InfoScale clusters
- Identifying patches applicable to your environment as well as how critical they are
From a storage perspective, VIOM can proactively monitor your utilization and can alert you when it reaches a predefined threshold. You can set a risk threshold that can be a warning and a fault threshold to signal that you need to take immediate action. VIOM gives you a centralized point of visibility and management for your storage operations – from disks, disk groups and volumes to filesystems and snapshots – all from a single intuitive and easy to use interface.
VIOM also enables a unique InfoScale feature called Virtual Business Services (VBS) which lets you manage availability and disaster recovery for a complex multi-tiered application as a single logical service. VBS is aware of the dependencies between application tiers and can manage the entire business service provided by the application without manual intervention. This means faster recovery and minimal downtime while providing a smooth and consistent end-user experience. Figure 2 shows an example of what this might look like in your environment.
VIOM managed resources, including Virtual Business Services, can be included in easily configured one-click DR recovery plans that can fully automate your DR operations. You can use a recovery plan in several ways: repurposing infrastructure, recovering applications and virtual business services, or to move/migrate applications and business services from one data center to another – on-premises or to the cloud.
Summary
Visibility and automation are key features needed to effectively manage today’s complex IT environments. VIOM provides the advanced visibility, intelligent automation, system management functionality, and comprehensive reporting that lets you run your mission-critical applications with confidence.
Please check out the InfoScale Technical Overview Veritas InfoScale: Managing Mission-Critical Applications in a Software-defined Data Center for more information on VIOM and InfoScale.
You can also check out the InfoScale technical library for additional InfoScale resources.
