Important terms

Infrastructure service  A running configuration of infrastructure resources that is designed to run a business application such as a multi-tier web application. Infrastructure resources include server blades, virtual machines, SAN disks, networks, and IP addresses. It is also referred to as a service or service instance.

Template  Specifies the requirements, or design, for an infrastructure service in terms of server groups, networks, and storage. It can also define customization points that use HP Operations Orchestration workflows to be executed during provisioning requests.

Resource pools  Defines groupings of physical server blades and VM hosts managed by the HP Virtual Server Environment. An administrator controls resource utilization by allowing users access to one or more Server pools. A storage pool defines available logical unit numbers (LUN) used as boot or data disks for physical servers.

Request  Users submit requests to perform initial provisioning and ongoing changes to the infrastructure. Users can monitor and cancel requests. Requests can be approved, rejected, canceled or continued by administrators. Users can submit the following types of requests:

Allocation  A request is assigned server, storage, and network resources based on the criteria defined in the template, resource pools assigned to the user, and the current reservations or allocations of resources completed by Insight Orchestration.

Approvals  An approval is required for requests submitted by self service users. Approvals are handled by an administrator, and occur between the allocation and provisioning phases of a service.

Provisioning  The process of creating a service from a template. Through the Insight Orchestration Self-Service Portal or the Insight Orchestration console, a user submits a request to create the service and Insight Orchestration controller searches its inventory allocating the computing resources to all logical resource definitions in the template.

Lease period  The duration, or lifetime, of an infrastructure service. It is set or changed by the user.

Workflow  Defines a set of additional actions that execute customer-specific IT tasks. Workflows are designed using Operations Orchestration, the workflow designer embedded in Insight Orchestration. You can use workflows to define integration with your IT processes, including approvals, manual operating system deployment, manual storage provisioning, and sending notifications.

You can also associate workflows with Insight Orchestration templates. These service action workflows are executed before and after the associated request. They are intended to perform actions specific to the template and services created from it. For more information on executions points, see Using Operations Orchestration.

Sample workflows are available in the folder Library/Hewlett-Packard/Insight Orchestration/Service Actions/Samples. You can use these sample workflows as-is, copy, or modify them.