Policy-Driven Compliance

Prior to any user performing a management operation, the VRM administrator defines policies that will be used to limit resource access, assure builds are configured to standards, and enforce process workflows, including approvals. Compared to provisioning physical servers, virtual machine provisioning reduces the service delivery time from months to days. Self-service provisioning, with policy driven enforcement, automated workflow, and operational oversight can further reduce VM provisioning time from days to minutes, while assuring that virtual machines are configured according to predefined policies.

VRM can be customized for each company’s unique environment through the creation of the following policies:

• Provisioning Groups – Created for each line of business, provisioning groups contain host reservations, virtual machine templates, and users authorized to manage the resources of the group.
• Virtual Machine Templates – VM templates are the blueprints for building virtual machines. VM templates contain workflow policies, build profiles, and security profiles that can be associated with one or more provisioning groups. VRM comes with out-of-the-box VM templates that can be cloned and customized.
  • Workflow Policies – Control execution flow
  • Build Profile – Specify virtual machine configuration properties
  • Security Profile – Specify user access and rights
• Host Reservations – Host reservations limit access to physical server resources, preventing resource conflict and over allocation.
• Authorized Users – Certin VRM users are authorized to manage the resources of a given provisioning group or given host or to designate other users for these roles.