Case Study - Creation of a Self-Service Portal to Provision VM's for One of the UK Telecom Client of Red Hat
The Challenge The client was using a manual way of provisioning virtual machines for their internal users which took ages and was prone to errors. They turned to Sorint for delivering a new, cost-effective Self-Service portal for orchestrating multiple VMs at the click of a button.
The Solution The solution implemented by Sorint was to create a new Self-Service portal for VM orchestration from scratch after talking to various stakeholders and different departments. The Solution involved various technologies and methodologies starting from DevOps, SRE to VMware vSphere, Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat Cloudforms, Infoblox and Ruby programming language.
Our Work When Sorint started working on the project, each task for creating VMs was manual. Just to request a new VM, a user had to send an email to the Sysadmin department. They would then commission and install the VM, storage capacity team would allocate storage, network team would allocate an IP address by consulting a spreadsheet, then security team would harden it and handover to QA department for checks and finally the VM was delivered to the original requestor. That was for one VM. The same procedure had to be repeated each time by the user if they needed more VMs.
When Sorint started work on the project, we initially studied all the manual processes for one month and then came up with the architecture design of a new Self-Service portal which would cut all the manual processes (except the manager approval of course) and reduce the overhead for all the teams.
After having the architecture proposal approved, Sorint then started to put in place all the necessary tools, infrastructure, automation, and scripts for creating the new Self-Service portal for orchestrating new workloads for the next four and half months. So, we delivered the solution required by the customer in under 6 months, resulting in huge cost savings for the customer.
Methodology The methodology used by Sorint from the start were that of a combination of DevOps and SRE due to which we brought in a combination of automation, configuration, monitoring, observability, orchestration, and self-service tools together. We transformed the environment for customer from manual provisioning to that of click button orchestration. The tools deployed were as per the below list but not limited to: VMware vSphere, VMware NSX, Red Hat Cloudforms, Red Hat Satellite, Infoblox DDI – DHCP, DNS and IPAM (IP Address Management), Ruby programming language.
In summary, the expert knowledge of Sorint resources on all the above tools and technology was key for delivering the excellent Self-service portal for the client.
Benefits
- Savings on costs, resources, time, and better efficiency
- New Self Service Portal built for consumption across all departments.
- Reduced Time to Market for new applications.
- Better co-ordination between Developers, Sysadmin, Networks and Security teams
- Most important - Happy customers