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Character Summary:
Agent Pal – Virtualization/Cloud Consultant
Gibbs – CIO of a Fortune 100 Company ABC Corporation – strongly believes in leveraging technology to deliver an agile infrastructure meeting the constantly changing business needs. Always has an eye on the cost factor!!!
Abbie – IT Administrator of Dev/Test and Pre-production labs – big technology geek. Gets totally annoyed and keeps complaining to Gibbs about ‘silly’requests/complaints from the non-tech savvy end users.
Tony Dinozzo – Application Architect/Dev Lead – Cool customer – knows what he wants but starts work only at the eleventh hour.
Ziva – Test Lead from the Israeli Engg Team. Constantly engages in tussles with Tony – mostly around the Developer Tester ping pongs of “I can not reproduce the bug you reported. It works fine on my machine”, “The test bed you had setup was not properly configured” etc…
Michelle – One of the non-tech savvy end users of Abbie, works in the Marketing team and often finds a way to annoy Abbie with her incomplete weird requests!!
Part 1: Meeting the Dev/Test Pre-Production Lab Administrator
CIO Office at ABC Corp:
Meeting between Gibbs and Agent Pal
Gibbs – Hello Agent Pal, How are you doing?
Agent Pal – I am doing great Gibbs…. How are things at your end?
Gibbs – Exactly the reason I called you in Pal. As you know I run a small IT team of dedicated folks managing the growing infrastructure. I have always believed in leveraging technology to deliver an agile infrastructure to our business. So what have you got for me Agent Pal…
Agent Pal – Well, I guess you have called me in at the right time Gibbs. Let me introduce you to the latest Citrix XenServer, released a month ago and focused on automation and self service.
Gibbs – Let me introduce you to Abbie, she would be the right person to discuss the technical stuff.
Abbie’s Pre-Production Datacenter Lab:
Gibbs – Hey Abbie….What are you upto??
Abbie – Don’t ask Gibbs. The same provisioning process, I seem to be spending all my day setting up these software environments for Ziva (Test Lead), Michelle (Marketing) and all the other folks in the company. If you are not going to help with this, maybe I need to find a better job for myself Gibbs (Winks)
Gibbs – Good Try Abbie. But I got a solution for you. Meet Agent Pal, Cloud consultant – seems to have a solution to all your problems.
Agent Pal – Hey Abbie…Why don’t you talk about your problems and pain points in managing your lab and I’ll try to help.
Abbie – Well, first and foremost, I don’t want to spend all my day cloning and deploying VMs for each of my users.
Agent Pal – Have you looked at the new Citrix Self Service Portal… Let’s your users self provision the software environments of their choice – without you being involved at all…
Abbie – NO WAY PAL…These guys have no idea how to consume resources sparsely. I am sure my whole lab would be flooded with VMs the minute I give them self service option.
Agent Pal – No…No…No…It’s not just self service abbie…You are still the BOSS and you define policies on how users can access the resources
Abbie – Like…
Agent Pal – Well to mention a few, you define who can see/access what resource, how much of resources each person can consume, what actions each person can perform on the resources, and in fact if you want TOTAL control, you can make every VM provisioning request pass through your approval…So your users know who the REAL BOSS is :-)
Abbie - Great…Now that I can let users self provision environments under the watchful eyes of Abbie, how do we deal with cleaning up those VMs…am sure my users will never do it…
Agent Pal – No problem…Citrix Self Service Portal manages the cradle to grave lifecycle of you VMs – no worries to the IT admin
Abbie – Swweeeeeet…And my users keep complaining about performance degrading when they launch more and more VMs… I often have to manually to move VMs from overloaded hosts to less loaded hosts? Do you have an automated solution to that too???
Agent Pal – Oh yah…The Workload balancer can automatically optimize your VM workloads and guess what it can also consolidate all VMs to fewer hosts during night times and move it back automatically when your users are back to work….Saves you lots on power consumption…
Abbie – Ohhh….Wow…You are really awesome…I am sure Gibbs is going to love that...(Gives Agent Pal a warm hug)
To be continued…
Part 2 : Meet the Dev and Test Leads - Read it here
PS: This is my personal blog and none of the posts here can NOT be linked to my employer in any aspect.
