Understanding Intersight Workload Optimizer Supply Chain
Intersight Workload Optimizer models your environment as a market of buyers and sellers. It discovers different types of entities in your environment via the targets you have added, and it then maps these entities to the supply chain to manage the workloads they support. For example, for a hypervisor target, IWO discovers VMs, the hosts and datastores that provide resources to the VMs, and the applications that use VM resources. For a Kubernetes target, it discovers services, namespaces, containers, container pods, and nodes. The entities in your environment form a chain of supply and demand, where some entities provide resources while others consume the supplied resources. IWO stitches these entities together, for example, by connecting the discovered Kubernetes nodes with the discovered VMs in vCenter.
Supply Chain Terminology
Cisco introduces specific terms to express IT resources and utilization in relation to supply and demand. The terms shown in Table 5-1 are largely intuitive, but you should understand how they relate to the issues and activities that are common for IT management.
Table 5-1 The Supply Chain Terminologies Used in IWO
Working with Intersight Workload Optimizer
The public cloud provides compute, storage, and other resources on demand. By adding an AWS Billing Target (AWS) or Microsoft Enterprise Agreement (Azure) to use custom pricing and discover reserved instances, you enable IWO to use that richer pricing information to calculate workload size and RI coverage for your Azure environment. You can run all of your infrastructure on a public cloud, or you can set up a hybrid environment where you burst workload to the public cloud as needed. IWO can analyze the performance of applications running on the public cloud and then provision more instances as demand requires. For a hybrid environment, IWO can provision copies of your application VMs on the public cloud to satisfy spikes in demand, and as demand falls off, it can suspend those VMs if they’re no longer needed. With public cloud targets, you can use IWO to perform the following tasks:
• Scale VMs and databases
• Change storage tiers
• Purchase VM reservations
• Locate the most efficient workload placement within the hybrid environment while ensuring performance
• Detect unused storage volumes
Claiming AWS Targets
For IWO to manage an AWS account, you provide the credentials via the Access Key that you use to access that account. (For information about getting an Access Key for an AWS account, see the Amazon Web Services documentation.)
To add an AWS target, specify the following:
• Custom Target Name: The display name that will be used to identify the target in the Target List. This is for display in the UI only; it does not need to match any internal name.
• Access Key: Provide the Access Key for the account you want to manage.
• Access Key Secret: Provide the Access Key Secret for the account you want to manage.