Open Workflow Management

At the heart of DynamicOps Virtual Resource Manager is a workflow engine that describes and controls the activities of the software and people involved in managing each of the processes within the virtual infrastructure lifecycle. VRM’s workflow manager tracks and controls the actions of its resource allocation manager and enforces all necessary constraints, using workflow events and actions. Authorized users obtain clean, brand-new workstations and servers in a few minutes with minimal hassle. System status is automatically tracked. Reprovisioning and other operations are easily handled. When the owner is finished with the machine, the resources that were previously provisioned to it are automatically reclaimed.

The master workflow describes the various virtual machine states and their linkages within the virtual lifecycle. This event-driven workflow model is optimized to support long-running, dynamic tasks. As virtual machines move from state to state, pre and post-processing sequential workflows are executed to perform more limited, static operations. For example, the procedure to actually build or clone a virtual machine is an instance of a sequential workflow. Activities are the individual steps within a workflow that perform specific operations by either people or software.

VRM ships with a master work flow and predefined sequential workflows optimized for use cases like desktop and server provisioning, setting up test environments or compute farms, and managing disaster recovery deployments. VRM’s prepackaged workflows can be customized by either modifying VM templates, or by adding and removing activities within the workflow.

Based on Windows Workflow Foundation, VRM's workflow engine provides an open interface for integrating with other software applications. This integration capability is very important as no single vendor will be able to provide best of breed products for every facet of managing a virtual infrastructure. VRM’s architecture allows other applications to be easily “plugged-in” to VRM’s workflow or call VRM’s services.