Managing super clusters can be a complicated and tedious job to do. As environments grow in size and complexity, the need to reorganize and move workloads around to optimize efficiency and performance on-premises is a critical aspect of IT infrastructure management. Here is where Turbonomic can help you automate this process and help you ensure that your infrastructure is running as efficiently as possible . Read on to know how!
By creating merge policies that merge 2 or more similar entities, we can allow Turbonomic to optimize on-premises infrastructure resource usage across data centers, clusters, storage clusters and now networks.
There are many reasons you may want to move workloads around within and across data centers in your IT environment. It may be that you have newer and more powerful hardware that you want to have critical workloads make use of, or it may be that you have scheduled maintenance coming up in some portions of your data center. Turbonomic will automate this activity for you and allow you to create policies so that it occurs in a desired and deterministic manner.
Take for example, you have two vSphere distributed switches in your vCenter. One is your legacy 10GbE network and the other is your new 25GbE ACI network. You want to move critical workloads from your legacy 10GbE network into the new 25GbE ACI to be able to meet customer demand and traffic. Turbonomic can automate the movement of Virtual Machines on Hosts from the legacy network to the new network.
By default when a VM is moved, it will connect to the same network as it was connected to initially. However if you need to move to a different network, setting up Turbonomic policies will help you do that.
Let me show you how you can set up policies and have Turbonomic manage this migration for you with ease.
Example VM and the initial setup
We have a VM "VM Move Demo" connected to a network DPortgroup1 running on host esx10.turbo.raleigh.ibm.com
We want to move it from it's current host esx10.turbo.rtp.raleigh.ibm.com which has network DPortgroup1 to esx11.turbo.raleigh.ibm.com which has DPortGroup2. By default when we set up a placement policy in Turbonomic, actions will be generated when the destination host has the same network. However we want to switch networks and we can do this by setting up a merge policy to tell Turbonomic that these two networks are compatible with each other.
Create a group of VM(s) that need to be placed on a group of hosts(s).
Select the host group
Create a placement policy
Source and destination hosts do not offer the same network resulting in a reconfigure action
Create a merge network policy from the placement policies section
Select the networks to be merged
The "Reconfigure" action has now changed to a "Move" action 
The Move action can now be executed
So what is happening under the covers? Since a merge network policy has been created, Turbonomic will now consider all networks that are part of that policy to be compatible with each other and allow VMs to move between hosts that offer any of these networks. So in this case the policy configured Turbonomic to consider DPortgroup1 and DPortgroup2 to be compatible networks and hence, a move action was generated for the VM.
When the move action is executed, Turbonomic will prepare a list of compatible networks and compare it to the networks on the host. If a network with the same name as the original network, DPortgroup1, exists, then this will be the selected network. Otherwise, Turbonomic will look at the destination host and pick a network in the destination that is in the list of compatible networks configured by the merge policy. When the VM is moved from source to destination host, the new network will be explicitly configured to be connected to the VM.
By default Turbonomic generates manual actions to move virtual machines. Once you've created policies and are comfortable with how the migration of virtual machines will be done, you can create an automation policy on the group of virtual machines making the actions automatic. You can even create schedules so that you minimize the impact of moving running services. Turbonomic will then take care of the rest and move your virtual machines over to the new environment.
Further reading
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