Cloud Lifecycle Management - Expert Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c - page 151

Chapter 5
Cloud Lifecycle Management
by Bobby Curtis and Anand Akela
Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud Control promises to deliver greater adaptability for dynamic business needs,
significant operational efficiencies, and lower overall operational costs. For an organization to achieve these goals,
we need to have a comprehensive and complete management solution. Without the cloud lifecycle management
components of EM12c, these promises cannot be realized and enterprises may not derive maximum value out of
their cloud computing infrastructure. The components in cloud lifecycle management allow organizations to be
flexible with their architecture and derive greater business value from stretched resources. The tools covered by cloud
lifecycle management include the following:
• Self Service portal : Allows administrators to configure the cloud and perform various
operations such as defining policies associated with the cloud, exposing the cloud to users,
deciding the total amount of resources that each user can reserve, and defining policies for
the system.
Chargeback : Allows enterprise organizations to allocate the costs of the Information
Technology resources to the people, departments, or organizations that consume them.
Consolidation Planner : Allows enterprise organizations to map managed servers to
consolidated resources, such as Oracle Exadata or Oracle Virtual Machine, and to plan
consolidation by using metrics and configuration data stored in the Oracle Management
Repository.
Before we dive into these cloud lifecycle management tools using EM12c, let's review what cloud computing
really is.
What Is Cloud Computing?
Although you can find many definitions of cloud computing, the National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST) published one of the most complete and credible definitions in September 2011. 1
According to NIST, “Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access
to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (for example, networks, servers, storage, applications, and
services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”
In this section, we'll add some details to this general definition. First, we'll review the essential characteristics of
cloud computing. Then we'll look at the basic cloud computing service and supported deployment models.
1 The NIST definition of Cloud Computing: http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145.pdf