IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator

IBM SmartCloud
Orchestrator
A Technical Overview

Date: February 24, 2014

Table of Contents
1Executive summary ...............................................................................................3
2Why do you need an orchestrator in your cloud? ...............................................5
3IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator Architecture.........................................................8
3.1IBM SmartCloud Foundation...........................................................................8
3.2IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator.........................................................................8
3.2.1IBM SmartCloud Provisioning at a glance ........................................8
3.2.2IBM SmartCloud Monitoring at a glance ...........................................9
3.2.3IBM SmartCloud Cost Management at a glance ..............................9
3.2.4IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator per se at a glance ........................... 10
3.3IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator High Level Architecture ................................. 10
3.3.1IBM SmartCloud Provisioning at a glance ...................................... 11
3.3.2IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator at a glance...................................... 12
4IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator Content .............................................................. 13
5Custom Operations ............................................................................................. 16
5.1.1Event operations ........................................................................... 16
5.1.2Instance operations ....................................................................... 17
5.1.3Service operations ......................................................................... 17
6IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator Service Catalog ................................................. 18
6.1SmartCloud Automation Modeling User Experience ..................................... 22
6.2Operations Context ...................................................................................... 23
6.3Custom data persistency .............................................................................. 24
6.3.1Use of Operation Context through request (example) .................... 25
7IBM Cloud Marketplace ....................................................................................... 27
7.1What is cloud automation content ................................................................. 28
7.2How to build Cloud Automation Content? ..................................................... 28
7.3IBM Cloud Automation Marketplace Value Proposition ................................. 28
8More information ................................................................................................. 30
9Trademark Terms ................................................................................................ 31
AAppendix: IBM SmartCloud Foundation ............................................................ 32
A.1IBM SmartCloud Control Desk ..................................................................... 32
A.2IBM SmartCloud Application Performance Management .............................. 32

List of figures
Figure 1: IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator at a glance .............................................4
Figure 2: Example of real workflow ........................................................................5
Figure 3: Data Center Domains ..............................................................................6
Figure 4: IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator High Level Architecture ...................... 11
Figure 5: Event operations for typical pattern deployment ................................ 16
Figure 6: IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator Service Catalog UI............................... 18
Figure 7: Operations Registry .............................................................................. 19
Figure 8: Create a new operation ......................................................................... 20
Figure 9: The three types of operations ............................................................... 20
Figure 10: SmartCloud Automation Modeling User Experience ......................... 23
Figure 11: Operations Context ............................................................................. 24
Figure 12: Use of Operation Context through request (example) ...................... 26
Figure 13: IBM Cloud Marketplace ....................................................................... 27

1

Executive summary
In today’s ever changing business environment, IT is becoming a fundamental
business process that allows enterprises to become more effective at delivering
solutions to their customers and users. The cloud paradigm can dramatically
increase the speed of delivery of new business services while reducing operational
cost and improving quality of services.
As enterprises look to integrate and optimize their cloud infrastructure, they need
advanced cloud capabilities for automating the management of virtual environments
and building a dynamic service delivery model. The ability to support user-driven
services requests and orchestrated resource deployment is pivotal to an optimized
infrastructure.
IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator is a comprehensive service delivery platform for cloud
environments that can help drive down costs and increase speed to deliver business
services. As part of the IBM SmartCloud Foundation products suite, IBM SmartCloud
Orchestrator provides advanced cloud management capabilities for enterprises
which need to integrate their business policies and systems together in a customized
cloud service via workflow orchestration.
Simply put, IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator provides end to end service deployment
across infrastructure and platform layers with integrated IT workflow capabilities for
runbook automation and IT governance, resource monitoring and cost management.
It offers a consistent, flexible and automated way of integrating the Cloud with your
data center policies, processes and infrastructure across your various IT domains.
You can define and implement business rules and IT policies with an intuitive
graphical tool. It helps you connecting the aspects of your different data center
domains into a consistent orchestration of automated tasks and human tasks achieving business goals and ensuring compliance. This assembly provides an
extensible approach for integrating with your existing environments such as network
and storage management tools as well as integration with your specific service
management processes such as those defined in IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®).
IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator is based on the IBM Common Cloud Stack (CCS)
which also includes OpenStack® (note IBM is a platinum sponsor of OpenStack
Foundation). CCS aims to provide a common realization of the core cloud
technologies for effective and efficient management of cloud systems.
One very critical piece in the overall IBM orchestration strategy is the IBM Cloud
Marketplace. Accessible from the Internet, it acts as the center for either publishing
or consuming contents (a kind of “AppStore”). In a nutshell, the Cloud Marketplace is
the IBM cornerstone for establishing an ecosystem between creators of contents and
users of contents for SmartCloud Orchestrator. It hosts extensions developed by
IBM, partners and even customers to help accelerate the integrations of SmartCloud
Orchestrator and related partners / customer’s products. At the core, IBM is focusing
on integration with additional products from its hardware and software divisions, in
the areas of networking, storage, service management, etc. All these IBM contents
are downloadable, free of charge, from the IBM Cloud Marketplace. Therefore, you

will be able to directly download your needed contents to your cloud platform (for
example in your test systems) and try out.
In summary, IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator is an open and scalable platform that
allows integration of Cloud with your data center policies, processes, and
infrastructure in a consistent, flexible, and automated way, across various IT
domains.

An open and scalable
cloud platform

A marketplace for content
sharing and re-use

An easy to use orchestrator for
cloud service automation

A ready to use automation
library

© 2013 IBM Corporation

Figure 1: IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator at a glance

It comes with ready to use orchestration capabilities; further additional contents,
toolkits, and other building blocks can be easily found, used, adapted, and shared by
the network system that is centered on the IBM Cloud Marketplace.
Next sections in this document are focusing on:
Why do you need an orchestrator in your cloud?
IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator High Level Architecture
IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator Content
Custom operations
IBM Cloud Marketplace

2

Why do you need an orchestrator in your cloud?
There are various reasons you need an orchestrator; here some examples:
Customers and users are looking for end to end automation of cloud service
delivery to achieve greater returns;
Provisioning play a key role, but is just one of many steps that must be
automated;
Each customer or user has unique requirements to integrate with existing data
center processes and tools.
In the following real environment, the orchestration is limited to the provisioning of
VMs only; as you can see it, only the technical part is their focus.

VM Provisioning

Real customer
example


Figure 2: Example of real workflow

More often than not, the need goes beyond than just provisioning image templates to
create VMs in the cloud, even if you are leveraging powerful patterns to instantiate
the service. In real environments, there are more processes required which are
surrounding the actual VMs provisioning to enable an end-to-end orchestration.
A typical example: before triggering the real provisioning, you may want approval
workflows which deal with accepting or rejecting certain services requests from users
for creation of virtual systems; at the end of the provisioning, you may also want to
add some VM entries in your CMDB in order to track the resources available in your
data center. Another example: in case of a private cloud, there is often a need to call
out multiple departments in the organization to collect the right information to prepare

items such as VLANs/storage/.. in order to start the provisioning afterwards. So, all
these kind of additional extensions to the actual VM provisioning can be coded with
workflows and actual processing.
This is not only interesting for the deployment phase but also for other lifecycle
operations such as termination of the services, de-registration of the services, etc.
You may need to return resources, clean up the CMDB accordingly. Again, all these
activities can be done in addition of the VM provisioning.
In other words, there are extra things that have to be done to enable a holistic cloud
solution. To address these, IBM is leveraging the notion of domains automation as
illustrated in the following figure:

Orchestration
Service
Catalog

Tooling

Domains
Data
Center
Automation
Domain

Service
Assurance
Domain

Cloud
Domain

Security
Domain

Infrastructure
&
Application
Resilience
Domain

Network
Domain

Storage
Domain

Asset,
License
Chargeback
ITIL & Work
Management
Domain

Workload
Scheduling
&
Automation
Domain


Figure 3: Data Center Domains

The most obvious one is the Data Center Automation Domain. It is dealing with
configuring hypervisors, copying images to the right location, starting an image to get
an instance of it, etc.
As illustrated in the above figure, there are other obvious domains such as
networking, storage that are needed by the virtual machines. Note for the storage
domain, you may also need for a “Storage as a Service” in which the file system has
its own lifecycle which is independent of virtual machines.
All these domains can integrate with existing SmartCloud Orchestrator workflows or
be tailored as needed to drive related activities in their respective domain.
SmartCloud Orchestrator unfolds the power of cloud computing in your data center
by providing a consistent, flexible and automated way to integrate with the policies,
processes and infrastructure across IT domains.

In summary, here are the key characteristics of SmartCloud Orchestrator:
Integrated orchestration of automated IT operations and human tasks;
Automation across all components of the cloud stack and across IT domains;
Production-level cloud in compliance with IT and business rules, achieving
business goals;
Intuitive graphical tooling to design and manage orchestration;
Protect investment in orchestration-level artifacts while exploiting domain-specific
technology updates.
Now it’s time to look over the high level architecture of SmartCloud Orchestrator.

3

IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator Architecture
Before jumping on the architecture of SmartCloud Orchestrator, let’s briefly introduce
the IBM SmartCloud Foundation initiative.

3.1

IBM SmartCloud Foundation
IBM SmartCloud Foundation is a set of capabilities which helps you more easily build
and rapidly scale cloud environments with improved time-to-market, integration, and
management.
IBM SmartCloud Monitoring, IBM SmartCloud Provisioning, IBM SmartCloud Control
Desk, IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator, IBM SmartCloud Cost Management, and IBM
Application Performance Manager are the offerings that are part of the IBM
SmartCloud Foundation family of products.
IBM SmartCloud Foundation provides integrated cloud capabilities which give you
varying entry points to cloud computing. IBM continues to enhance how the
SmartCloud Foundation capabilities are integrated based on the Open Services for
LifeCycle Collaboration (OSLC) approach, to deliver an open and integrated cloud
ecosystem.

3.2

IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator
IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator encompasses the following capabilities:
IBM SmartCloud Provisioning;
IBM SmartCloud Monitoring;
IBM SmartCloud Cost Management; and
IBM SmartCloud Orchestration per se.
Depending on requirements, additional capabilities are available such as IBM
SmartCloud Control Desk (including its Service Provider option) and IBM SmartCloud
Application Performance Management (a short description is available in the
appendix), and of course other Tivoli products.

3.2.1 IBM SmartCloud Provisioning at a glance
IBM SmartCloud Provisioning capabilities include:
A simple, easy-to-use deployable solution to help you move from no cloud to a
base cloud that may be up and running in less than a few days;
Multi-hypervisors support: Microsoft Hyper-V Server, Red Hat Kernel-based
Virtual Machine, VMware ESX, and Xen OpenSource, IBM Power Virtual
Machine, (zVM in the future), so you have choices and possibly save on licensing
costs;
Image lifecycle management: control image sprawl and reduce business risk with
rich analytics, image versioning, and federated image library to standardize
images; expand use cases to support security and governance models by

searching for images with particular content for patching and security auditability,
analyzing images for similarity to consolidate image types and storage;
Image Construction and Composition Tool that provides a graphical tool to build
an image recipe, using your company's approved operating systems and
software as ingredients, and then create an image that delivers the user's
requirements while providing an audit trail;
Highly automated self-service deployment of virtual machines in a reliable
nonstop cloud environment that allows you to add capacity by powering on a new
compute node, patch the infrastructure by simply dropping the patch in a
directory, and work around failures with a complete, distributed, redundant
infrastructure;
OpenStack Folsom;
Deliver on highly scalable fault tolerant architecture but also deploying multitiered applications and services for scalable and elastic cloud.

3.2.2 IBM SmartCloud Monitoring at a glance
IBM SmartCloud Monitoring provides performance and availability capabilities as part
of the SmartCloud Foundation.
As businesses consolidate and virtualize application workloads along their journey
toward cloud, the cost savings that they had envisioned often prove elusive. True
efficiency comes from the ability to right-size both the environment and the virtual
workloads - in response to actual performance data, rather than theoretical estimates
- in order to create an optimized cloud infrastructure that runs densely enough to
provide true consolidation while maintaining application service levels and room for
expansion.
IBM SmartCloud Monitoring monitors the health and performance of a cloud
infrastructure, including environments containing both physical and virtualized
components. This software provides the tools needed to assess current health and
capacity and model expansion, as needed.
IBM SmartCloud Monitoring provides:
Visibility into the cloud infrastructure including environments containing both
physical and virtualized components;
Monitoring of heterogeneous environments for visibility and control into all areas
of the infrastructure—physical, virtual and cloud;
What-if capacity analysis designed to model changes, reduce risk, improve
availability and lower energy and server costs; and
Policy-driven analytics for intelligent workload placement.

3.2.3 IBM SmartCloud Cost Management at a glance
As end users from IT and non-IT organizations request cloud services, they need
insight into the cost tied to specific SLAs of a dynamic service delivery. Service
Providers and their financial organization need to understand the service delivery
costs within and outside IT to maximize profitability of existing and new cloud
offerings.

IBM SmartCloud Cost Management provides a comprehensive financial cost
management environment where you can collect, assess, and bill based on the
usage and cost of the cloud service delivered … and help drive down the cost to
deliver business services.
SmartCloud Cost Management provides value particularly as part of SmartCloud
Orchestrator; however it also integrates with lower entry solutions like SmartCloud
Provisioning to provide cloud cost management metering and showback reporting.
IBM continues to support financial management customers outside the cloud service
management space and will continue to deliver new capabilities and benefits for such
deployments.

3.2.4 IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator per se at a glance
IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator is built on a common cloud stack and common pattern
modeling. The IBM Business Process Manager - Standard Edition (also known as
“Lombardi”) is used for workflow modeling and runtime capabilities. It is integrated in
such a way that event triggered automation provides the basis for cloud-centric
workflow enablement.
The major components of SmartCloud Orchestrator are:
The Runbook Automation Modeling UI; and
The Runbook Automation Engine.
Out-of-the-box, there are various runbooks and associated workflows provided as
‘content packs’ with SmartCloud Orchestrator as well as for Monitoring, and Cost
Management. SmartCloud Orchestrator therefore is packaging the appropriate
products and providing the necessary runbooks or runbook activities to leverage
these domains specific functionality.
Last but not least: contents, toolkits, and other building blocks can be easily found,
used, adapted, and shared by the network system that is centered around the IBM
Cloud Marketplace (see related chapter in this document).
Now it’s time to look at the high level architecture of IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator.

3.3

IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator High Level Architecture
In this section, and as illustrated on the figure below, we have “deliberately”
expanded the high level architecture around two of the four core components of IBM
SmartCloud Orchestrator only, i.e.:
IBM SmartCloud Provisioning (“boxes” in green); and
IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator (“boxes” in blue) per se.

Cloud
User

SmartCloud Orchestrator (SCO)

SmartCloud Provisioning (SCP)
SmartCloud
Monitoring

Automation
Automation
Modeling UI

(SCM)

Self Service

Orchestration
UI
UI

IBM Business Process
IBM Business Process
Manager (BPM)

Modeling and
Admin

ICCT
Image
Creation

API
API

SmartCloud
Cost
Management

API
API

Image
Library

Single Image & Composite Patterns
Management

(SCCM)
Automation Engine
Automation Engine
BPM Process Server

Hypervisor Management

IBM Extensions for
IBM Extensions for
Workload Aware
Workload Aware
optimizations
optimizations
(DRS & HA)
(DRS & HA)

OpenStack Gateway

OpenStack

Hybrid Extension
Hybrid Extension

SmartCloud
Enterprise

Content packages
Content packages

Service
Desk

License
Mgmt

Accounting

Cost
Mgmt

…

Network

Storage

Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2

KVM
KVM
VMware vCenter
VMControl Power

XEN
XEN
ESX
ESX
Hyper-V
Hyper-V


Figure 4: IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator High Level Architecture

The various components of the architecture are articulated as follows:
From SmartCloud Orchestrator self service UI, you can view patterns, edit virtual
system patterns, collect pre-deployment information, create virtual systems,
register operations. You can collect pre-deployment information from the user
during deployment;
SmartCloud Provisioning can dispense applications and topologies into a pool, or
cloud of virtualized hardware, and can manage resources. However, in case of
SmartCloud Orchestrator, provisioning is just a part of cloud orchestration;
The workflow design component, that is, the Automation Modeling UI easily
extends the design to a full orchestration use case in the Business Process
Manager. To deploy applications, SmartCloud Orchestrator provisions the pattern
and creates virtual machines for the database, application, and webservice. It
also takes care of orchestration with integration across various domains. For
example, it sets up backup monitoring, requests quota change, opens ticket
configuration, and sets up storage network. The resources of SmartCloud
Orchestrator run on hypervisors mentioned earlier in this document; and
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) federation API normalizes APIs across different
vendor clouds, such as IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, Amazon EC2, OpenStack
and similar such products.
Let’s start with IBM SmartCloud Provisioning.

3.3.1 IBM SmartCloud Provisioning at a glance
The main components are:

Self Service UI: the front end for users / consumers to request services;
Pattern Modeling: the modeling capabilities to manage virtual systems and virtual
applications patterns;
API: REST APIs you can leverage for integration with your own portal;
Image Construction and Composition Tool: help create images, SW bundles;
Image Library: manage the entire lifecycle of images and VMs;
Single image and composite patterns management: flows hardcoded to deploy,
copy, … images;
OpenStack Folsom;
IBM OpenStack gateway, a normalized API in order to get interactions with:
−

hypervisors (ESX, Hyper-V, KVM, Xen, … and zVM in the future);

−

hypervisor managers (VMware vCenter, IBM VMControl); and

Extensions added to the UI to drive specialized deployment with respect to high
availability and disaster recovery.
Let’s look over the IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator components per se.

3.3.2 IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator at a glance
IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator includes:
Automation Modeling UI: IBM BPM Process Designer;
Automation Engine: IBM BPM Process Server;
Additional orchestration features to the self service UI (more panels and contents
to deal with the automation pieces), note SmartCloud Orchestrator and
SmartCloud Provisioning have exactly the same UI;
API: REST APIs you can also leverage for integration with your own data center
domains;
Hybrid cloud extensions: for IBM SmartCloud Enterprise and Amazon EC2; and
Content packages: out-of-the-box orchestration contents providing additional
capabilities for various data center domains (service desk, network, storage,
firewall, load balancer, etc.). All of these various packages can be used by the
workflows defined in BPM Process Server, and they will be called out by the
activities defined in these content packages.
In next section, we are introducing the various “Content” types supported by IBM
SmartCloud Orchestrator.

4

IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator Content
IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator Content is an automation that enables SmartCloud
Orchestrator to make use of the functionality delivered by external software and
infrastructure devices.
In other words, when we talk about content for orchestration, we mainly talk about
workflows, snippets of workflows so called, i.e. a set of reusable entities of a
workflow which are the activities, the individual nodes that make up a complete
workflow and also things like user interfaces and widgets to name a few.
The workflow designer in BPM is not only capable of designing and creating
workflows which are executing things, but also able to create additional UI panels for
collecting specific information which is needed to drive any tailored orchestration.
There are different types of SmartCloud Orchestrator content that you can create and
deploy onto the cloud:
Content Type

Description

Virtual images

Virtual images provide the operating system and
product binary files that are required to create a virtual
system instance. For example, the IBM® OS Image for
Red Hat Linux Systems virtual image is preinstalled on
your appliance. These images can be extended to
customize the virtual images and the operating system.

Software Bundles

A software bundle contains and describes the software
available for use within a virtual image. It includes
information about how to install the software,
prerequisites of the software, and parameters available
for customizing the software. This combines your own
operating system definition along with custom software
bundles to create virtual bundles that can be
provisioned on the cloud.

Toolkits and Applications

Toolkits provide resources that you can use as you
build your process applications. Process applications
can share library items from one or more toolkits, and
toolkits can share library items from other toolkits. If you
have access to a toolkit, you can create a dependency
on the toolkit and use the library items within it for your
process development efforts. If the operations can be
reused, go for Toolkits. A process application is a
container for process models and their supporting
implementations; it is stored in the repository. After the
artifacts have been authored or otherwise created, they
are assembled into a process application. If you target
any specific process
implementation, then go for
application.

Content Adapters

The integration service calls the Content adapter and it
implements the logic required to invoke a target device
on the data center. The implementation is a Java class
that accepts BusinessObjects/Json. The content
adapter invokes the target device-sdk. It is the code that
bridges the Business Process Manager process and
domain adapter. The integration service invokes the
content adapter to perform the following tasks:
Receives Business Process Manager artifacts
Maps the received artifacts to Java objects
Invokes Domain Adapters

Domain Adapters

It is a Java class that implements the logic required to
invoke a target device on the data center. The inputs
and outputs are Java objects and it is completely
independent of the Business Process Manager.

Patterns

Create virtual application patterns to model virtual
applications that you can deploy to the cloud. A virtual
application is defined by a virtual application pattern. It
is a complete set of platform resources that fulfill a
business need, including web applications, databases,
user registries, messaging services, and transaction
processes. Each virtual application pattern is
associated with a pattern type, which is a collection of
plug-ins that provide these resources and services for a
particular business purpose in the form of components,
links and policies. The pattern types, product
extensions of the cloud system, and the types of virtual
application that you build depend on the pattern types
that you have enabled.

Workflow Automation

It is used for pre/post operations during pattern
deployment. In SmartCloud Orchestrator, they are
triggered by various operations. The different types of
triggers are:
Event Operation - event operations are related to
processes that are executed during pattern
deployment. For example, this can be an automated
approval process.
Instance Management Operation - Instance
operations are management extensions for
instances. For example, change password.
Service Operation - it is a process that is not
related to any pattern. For example, add a user.
Triggers can be either blocking (synchronous, that
is, this workflow must complete) or non-blocking
(asynchronous, that is, activities continue in

parallel).
In next section, we are focusing on the first three operations in bold under the
Workflow Automation row here above, called “Custom Operations”.

5

Custom Operations
As mentioned earlier, the orchestration is realized by the BPM workflows.
SmartCloud Orchestrator allows definition of custom operations for various
granularities:
Event operations;
Instance operations; and
Service operations.

5.1.1 Event operations
If we look at a typical pattern deployment process:

SCP base processing

Resolve
Model

Define
Placement

Copy
images

Configure
hypervisor

Pre-provision
Event

SCO
Custom BPM processes

Start VM

Pre-VM-start
Event

Execute
Config
Scripts

Notify
user

Post-provison
Post-provision-failed
Event

Trigger one or
multiple custom
processes on
certain events


Figure 5: Event operations for typical pattern deployment

It consists of various steps which are basically hard coded in the pattern
management engine. In SmartCloud Orchestrator, IBM introduces “EXIT” at various
points where you can register additional dedicated workflows. A typical example: in
pre-provision event you would register an approval process; while in post-provision
event, you would register an automation which adds the established VM in a CMDB
database for example.
You could register one or multiple of these processes and they will then be executed
depending on pre-, -post whenever the exits are defined.

We are not only providing these event operations for the deployment process but for
any lifecycle of operations.

5.1.2 Instance operations
Instance operations apply to instances.
Once you have deployed either a single image or pattern, you will get a service
instance (i.e. one or more virtual systems). While SmartCloud Provisioning already
provides a few instance operations such as start / stop of VMs, there may be specific
instance operations needed: as example, the deployment of a “WebShop” service
with a three-tier patterns (ex: HTTP server, Application Server, Database Server) for
test purpose in which there is a demand to reset the data or import very specific data
set. This can be implemented through instance operations. You would write a
workflow that exactly picks the data and deploy it into the database server; a user or
developer could via a simple click drive the reset of data and import these data. This
could also be applicable for backing up the system, taking snapshots, etc. So,
various types of use cases are possible here.

5.1.3 Service operations
Service operations are the kind of workflows which are primarily independent of any
service instances or any patterns.
There are different types of service operations; here are two examples (i.e. use
cases) triggered by the Self Service UI:
Administrative operations: as example, the on-boarding a new tenant or user
for which some specific things have to be done per context; you may want to
include your own workflows according to your needs and register them as service
operations;
Offering: you may want to offer cloud services which are independent from VMs,
an example is “storage as a service”: manage independent lifecycle of file system
where you can create a file system / delete a file system / mount a file system to
a VM. Another use case, normalizing data center resources: it’s about providing
a simple UI to a “low” end user so to speak in which the number of data to type in
is minimal. In this use case, the user will select a small, medium or large system
instead of presenting him a number of CPUs, various memory sizes and disk
spaces. Of course behind the scene, this information is hard coded in related
workflows.

6

IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator Service Catalog
Service operations described here above will show up in the SmartCloud
Orchestrator Service Catalog:


Figure 6: IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator Service Catalog UI

For a “low end user”, you may want to lighten the content of the service catalog. This
is also addressed by SmartCloud Orchestrator.
At this point, there is one piece missing when we talk about all the above custom
operations: how do they relate in SmartCloud Orchestrator?
This is where the Operation Registry entry comes into play in the SmartCloud
Orchestrator Administrator Self Service UI under Service Catalog tab shown
hereafter (note: this entry doesn’t exist in SmartCloud Provisioning):


Figure 7: Operations Registry

Operations Registry is used to register these newly created operations.
The Operation Registry is the central registry in SmartCloud Orchestrator where you
must register and configure all Business Process Manager-based custom extension
operations.
An extension to SmartCloud Orchestrator consists of user UI panels and a Business
Process Manager Business Process Definition:
The UI panels eventually collect more data that are then implemented by a
Business Process Manager Human Service (it’s optional); and
The Business Process Manager Business Process Definition defines the
activities of the extension operation. The extension consists of a Business
Process Manager Human Service and Business process. The business process
must be developed from the standard Process Designer and then registered as
extension points in the SmartCloud Orchestrator Operation Registry.
Let’s describe the three basic operations now.
The “create new operation” panel shown below invites the cloud administrator to
provide a name for the operation, a description, select an association type (i.e. one of
the three type of operations: event, instance, service) and some additional entries to
fill out depending on selected association type:


Figure 8: Create a new operation

For the sake of concision, the following figure illustrates the three types available in
SmartCloud Orchestrator in one screen:

Event Operation
Instance Operation

Service Operation

Service Operation

Select a custom BPM
process for this operation

Select corresponding user
interface
(BPM coach)


Figure 9: The three types of operations

Event Operation
It is a custom operation which is triggered by a specified event during predefined
management operations. For example, the predefined operation ‘Deploy pattern’
calls custom event operations that are registered in the Operation Registry for any of
the ‘deploy pattern’ events. Approval operation (subset of event-triggered operation)
is a special case of an event-triggered operation.
These operations are registered as an event-triggered operation for all patterns, and
are triggered on the ‘pre’ event before any default processing takes place. If required,
the approval operation can include a manual ‘Accept’ or ‘Reject’ to continue with the
operation. SmartCloud Orchestrator provides an approval panel that lists all pending
approvals, and a means to accept or reject.
If you look at “Event Operation” panel and select Event Operation under Association
Type, you will be prompted for selecting one of the defined user exits. There are
various Event Operations for each of the lifecycle operations that is already
implemented by SmartCloud Provisioning (again part of IBM SmartCloud
Orchestrator), such as pre- and post-events.
Instance Operation
It is a custom action that is run by the user on a single image deployment, virtual
system instance, or virtual application instance. These kinds of operations implement
additional lifecycle management action that extends the set of predefined actions.
For example, as the list of predefined operations does not include a system backup,
this can be implemented as instance-level operation. The instance level operations
are accessible through the list of actions on the instance details view panel.
If you look at “Instance Management Operation” under Association Type, you will see
the “Apply to” which is also valid for Event Operation of course.
Here you could define whether you want to apply this Operation to a very specific
pattern or image, or to all. For example: an approval workflow is typically apply to all
patterns, and all images; you will do approval all the time but resetting some test
data, in our above WebShop example, will of course apply to this specific pattern; it
will not make sense to have this Instance Operation for any other service or pattern.
So, you can limit Instance Operations to one or multiple images or patterns.
Service Operation
Service operation is a custom operation, which can be run in the context of the data
center. These operations are administrative operations and are used to automate the
configuration. Service operations can also be used to enhance the catalog of
available services with additional functionality.
Service operations are independent of any existing instance or process or events.
You can register your process and your UI. As example, you way want the following
BPM workflow to be executed “on-boarding a new user or customer”: a process (i.e.
the steps) would be to associate certain resources pool to that user or customer, you

will provide him dedicated storage resources, dedicated VLANs, etc. he can work
with.
In order to do so, you may also need to collect additional data, for example: you
would ask the amount of storage he will get; that is the reason why you can register a
user interface here which corresponds to this actual process. With that UI which is
called “BPM coach”, you would collect the necessary properties. We will see later on
how this process looks like and the interface creation.
In designing SmartCloud Orchestrator, a goal was also to drive all these operations
and all functionalities through an external portal because many customers have
already their own portal, and they want to integrate with that one. That’s the reason
IBM decided to split the approach in two parts, in other words:
The actual execution part; and
The user interface part which collects the parameters.
By doing that way, you could always call the actual process from an external portal.
This external portal has the duties to collect, get or set data the necessary
parameters for the process.
Next section introduces the process modeling capabilities in a context of IBM
SmartCloud Orchestrator.

6.1

SmartCloud Automation Modeling User Experience
The following figure is a screenshot from the IBM Business Process Designer (note:
a few callouts are added for information purpose):

Rich tooling functions to
edit, version, debug,
optimize workflows

Access to rich libraries
(toolkits) of reusable
automation assets that
enable to speed automation
creation

Graphical editor for
composing and
connecting workflows

Palette of library assets
enable easy workflow
composition through drag
and drop

Rich set of actions types,
flow control, data handling
primitives that simplify
creation of complex
automations

Easy workflow action editing
for managing: data mapping,
error recovery options,
implementation details , etc.

Figure 10: SmartCloud Automation Modeling User Experience

In the central pane, you can see a set of various nodes in the process and activities
with decision points. You can select existing controls from the vertical palette on the
right side. The good news is that you can start small (so to speak) by wiring things
without having a real implementation behind it. You can check if this is the process
you want, you can change it. When you are done with the modeling, you can start
with the implementation underneath each of these activities; and BPM allows you to
leverage various technologies. The simplest one is that you use Javascript to
implement these activities. If there are any activities to just get the right VM ip
address, this can be easily implemented via Javascript. There are more complex
ones where you want to call out external programs or products or even hardware,
firewall, load balancer, what ever. For this kind of situations, BPM allows you to
create these via REST calls, webservices, SSH calls,... which are typically used to
callout to external systems.
So, each of these activities could have different a implementation and there are
basically wired together and kept together by leveraging and using a kind of data
container (so called private data) which is floating throughout all the process and
which could be accessed by each of these individual nodes.
To ease now the creation of a very customized workflow, there are some toolkits
coming to play. Some are already provided with SmartCloud Orchestrator but there
can be specific toolkits provided which are implementing very specific
implementations (for example: adding some backup capabilities).
What is a toolkit?
Basically, a toolkit is really the implementation of such an “activity box”.
With a toolkit, you have a sort of implementation. In the above figure, there is a list of
various backup related integration services such as cancel, create, delete backup
policies. If you have such a toolkit available you can just kick this implementation and
drag them to such an activity; and by that, it is bound to that implementation. You, as
creator of your process, you don’t care about the actual implemenation. The only
thing you care about is the data mapping. For each of these implementations of
individual node activities, there will be some inputs and outputs; and BPM allows you
an easy way to do the mapping of these parameters which are available for example
in your workflow context and map them to the input of your individual implementation.
It is very easy to work with this kind of editor especially if you have a bunch of toolkits
available; you can drag them to build your own processes as needed.
Let’s share a few words on Operations Context.

6.2

Operations Context
The following figure shows an operation context and a service instance:


Figure 11: Operations Context

With each call of such an operation (this is especially the event operation and the
instance operation), they are executed in a certain context; and the context is the
actually deployed system or the actual request you are processing and therefore
each of these operations on workflows are getting called with so called “operations
context objects”.
This is the data that you can directly leverage in your workflow by simply using this
data mapping capability.
So, for example, beside the actual operational context with some metadata, there is
also the service instance object included which lists all the VMs of your deployed
service. You can easily pick the data from these VMs (e.g. hostname, IP address)
and they can then be used in your process; for example: by adding those as input for
CI (Configuration Item) creation activities and passing this IP address to this CI
creation code.
Next section addresses custom data persistency: a feature that is often asked by our
customers.

6.3

Custom data persistency
If you know Tivoli Provisioning Manager, you know it has a Data Center Model called
DCM which keeps data representing your data center such as hypervisors, routers,
servers, software, etc.
Within SmartCloud Provisioning and therefore SmartCloud Orchestrator, IBM uses a
different approach. In SmartCloud Orchestrator, it only keeps the absolutely

necessary data, and instead uses points or references to external systems in order to
get to certain data. This has the advantage of using an actual view of your systems
and not relying on having always the actual correct data in your own model.
If we look at the persistency of data, each of these extensions may also need to
“persist” additional data; typically, it will also be a kind of references to external
objects. Here we are providing a set of capabilities depending on the use cases
(especially depending on the lifecycle) whether you need to persist data just for
certain requests or service instances or even cross service instances. Again, the
good news is that are various toolkits to help enabling these kinds of data
persistently. Last but not least, there are also some descriptions about how we deal
with these additional data in typical flow.
How data is passed:
Extensions build for SmartCloud Orchestrator usually need ‘custom data’;
Persistency options for custom data:
−

Save with operation context (request lifecycle),

−

Save with instance object,

−

Use ‘persistency toolkit’,

−

Use external database,

−

Use CMDB (IBM SmartCloud Control Desk toolkit available);

‘Mixed’ models are regularly used, i.e. instance keeps reference to externally
stored data and all additional data which is not available externally.
Now that we have defined Operation Context and Data Persistency, let’s have a look
at the use of operation context through request example.

6.3.1 Use of Operation Context through request (example)
The following figure shows how data is passed.

SCO

1
Once per registered
event operation

SCO REST API

3

Pre-process
event

Operation
context

Core CCS
processing

Post-process
event

4

5

SCO REST API

Custom
Custom
Data
Data

Operation
context

2
BPM
Human
Service

Operation
context
A
Operation
context B

BPM
Process

A
B

pre-provision
event operation

post-provision
event operation


Figure 12: Use of Operation Context through request (example)

If we look at the various components like what we talk about we do have the BPM
Human Service which represents the UI and collects the data from an end user.
The data is then persisted in the operations context. Later on, it’s passed through the
individual BPM processes which are doing the actual execution and again; and as
earlier said, the separation of UIs actual execution you would also be able to drive all
these operations from an external portal by just providing the necessary operations
context. Of course data is needed by these execution processes, but this can be
done by REST calls and no UIs will be involved in that case.
Next chapter introduces the IBM Cloud Marketplace.

7

IBM Cloud Marketplace
The IBM Cloud Automation Marketplace is a hosting solution for cloud services which
are complicated to find, a one-stop shop that allows marketers to come together,
find, discover cloud content and extend IBM's cloud solution in a collaborative
manner with a goal to improve the ecosystem and assist sales, services and
business partners with deploying and managing cloud solutions .
Typical marketers would be IBMers, customers, business partners, and ISV's.
The Marketplace federates relevant content from ISML and other existing
repositories into a single content catalog and provides various business models for
selling content and support.
The IBM Cloud Automation Marketplace delivers capabilities for:
End users to collaborate and discover solution capabilities to address business
needs;
End users to request & have content automatically delivered & configured for
use; and
IBM and Business partners to publish, update, meter and monetize content using
a Web-based delivery model.
Establish cloud platform agility and value by rapidly delivering content (organic &
partner ecosystem) using the AppStore model.


Figure 13: IBM Cloud Marketplace

It’s one central point that helps enable:
Customers to rapidly discover and implement cloud solutions (use a simple oneclick download option to download content into the IBM Business Process
Management software's designer view to build data center orchestration);
Business partners and ISVs to create value by adding content to IBM cloud
solutions;
IBM services and development to rapidly deliver and iterate on capabilities in
response to changing customer requirements and integration needs; and
Collaboration within the ecosystem to accelerate customer value creation.

7.1

What is cloud automation content
Any content that can be uploaded on the Cloud Stack and having the following
characteristics:
Leverage existing extension points on the cloud stack; and
Easily upgradable to new releases and fix packs.

7.2

How to build Cloud Automation Content?
IBM provides dedicated documentation and examples on how to build cloud
automation content through the SmartCloud Orchestrator Content Development
Guide.

7.3

IBM Cloud Automation Marketplace Value Proposition
There are various advantages to leverage cloud content on the IBM Cloud
Automation Marketplace.
Some of the major ones are:
Time to value for cloud implementation: Cloud Automation Content will be
available as a 1 click download;
Sharing Content; and
Finding content for your problem: Marketplace would serve as a central
repository for all the content that you want for your cloud implementation.
These induce the following business and technical benefits for your enterprise:
Business benefits
Enable customers to rapidly discover and implement cloud solutions;
Enable business partners and ISVs to create value by adding content to IBM
cloud solutions;
Enable IBM services and development to rapidly deliver & iterate on capabilities
in response to changing customer requirements and integration needs; and
Enable collaboration within the ecosystem to accelerate customer value creation.
Technical benefits

Simplify the lifecycle of content creation, delivery and deployment;
Provide a consolidated view to content spanning the build, manage and create
phases of the cloud deployment; and
Enable social collaboration platform to enable tighter interlock between
customers, partners and IBM.
In summary, a user can upload content to the IBM Cloud Marketplace, search for
content and use a simple one-click download option to download content into the
IBM Business Process Management software's designer view to build data center
orchestration.

8

More information
The technical documentation of the product can be found on the IBM website at
http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/tivihelp/v48r1/topic/com.ibm.sco.doc_2.2/welcome.
html.

9

Trademark Terms
© International Business Machines Corporation 2013
All Rights Reserved.
IBM Corporation

ITIL® is a registered trade mark of the Cabinet Office
Linux® is the Registered Trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries.
OpenStack is trademark of OpenStack, LLC
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a Registered Trade Mark of Red Hat
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a Registered Trade Mark of Novell.
VMware, ESX, ESXi, vCenter are Registered Trade Mark of VMware, Inc.
Windows, Windows Server are Registered Trade Mark of Microsoft Corporation.

A

Appendix: IBM SmartCloud Foundation
This appendix briefly describes two additional capabilities that are part of the IBM
SmartCloud Foundation:
IBM SmartCloud Control Desk; and
IBM SmartCloud Application Performance Management.

A.1

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk
IBM SmartCloud Control Desk unified asset and service management software
provides a common control center for managing business processes for both digital
and physical assets. This IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)-compliant software is
accessible through mobile devices and integrates with social media and development
tools. Now you can choose the delivery model you need such as on-premise,
software as a service (SaaS) or VM image and seamlessly change it when your
business needs evolve.
IBM SmartCloud Control Desk includes:
Service request management gives you an efficient service desk for handling
service requests and managing incidents;
Change, configuration and release management provides advanced impact
analysis and automated change procedures designed to reduce risk and support
integrity of services;
IT asset lifecycle management provides inventory management and software
license compliance capabilities: helps to manage assets throughout their
lifecycle, optimizing usage of digital and physical assets and minimizing
compliance risks;
Service catalog helps users solve their own problems: provides an intuitive selfhelp portal and a complete catalog of services; and
Support for service providers supply service support and service delivery
capabilities for multiple customers in a single deployed instance. This can help
increase profitability and improve customer or user satisfaction.

A.2

IBM SmartCloud Application Performance Management
The growing cloud computing model has created challenges for traditional
performance and availability management practices. In traditional environments, one
rely on disciplines like root cause analysis. However, today's cloud administrator is
focused on resilience and elasticity. In this new cloud model, application availability is
an imperative, and performance shortcomings will directly affect a business' bottom
line revenue.
IBM SmartCloud Application Performance Management extends the performance
and availability capabilities of IBM SmartCloud Foundation to include transaction
tracing, monitoring of end-user performance, and prevention of transaction
bottlenecks which cause performance degradations. With options of agent or agentless tracking combined together in a single topology view, IBM SmartCloud

Application Performance Management may be used by IT Operations or
development teams, with the ability to specify the level of detailed analysis
necessary.
IBM SmartCloud Application Performance Management is a single, comprehensive
solution that intelligently manages performance, availability, and capacity for complex
application infrastructures in cloud and hybrid environments. SmartCloud Application
Performance Management offers the right visibility, control, and automation for
critical applications. With its modular design, SmartCloud Application Performance
Management lets you get started quickly and easily to add capabilities as they are
needed. Additionally, SmartCloud Application Performance Management delivers:
Easy-to-understand, role-based, web dashboards with smart drill downs, making
it easier to sense, isolate, and diagnose availability, performance, and capacity
issues;
Analytics to improve capacity utilization and optimize performance;
A common reporting tool, IBM Cognos based, to help make reporting simple and
easy to customize
Breadth of domain coverage in combination with a single trusted source of
information for more accurate and faster problem diagnostics; and
An entry edition that intelligently manages essential infrastructure and
applications in cloud and hybrid environments.
SmartCloud Application Performance Management can help enable IT operations
and application support teams to optimize the performance of enterprise level IBM
Business Process Manager Standard Edition and Advanced Edition solutions.
Businesses need to react quickly to market demands and need to support execution
of their business strategies with dynamic business processes that can be
implemented quickly and easily. Business process management (BPM) enables you
to discover, model, execute, rapidly change, govern, and gain end-to-end visibility of
your business processes.

IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator

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