Manager CloudPortal services and Rainmaker - Better Together

8:51 PM
Manager CloudPortal services and Rainmaker - Better Together -

There was excellent feedback about the Rainmaker project of those who had the chance to see it. I am very pleased of the response to date and hope we can get more people involved and excited about this new technology

One issue that was raised by several people is :. How CloudPortal Services Manager (formerly known as Cortex) and Rainmaker fit together? Is there an overlap in functionality? Should we replace the need for the other

The answer is :?

  • Neither Services Manager, or replace the other Rainmaker
  • Neither Services Manager or Rainmaker requires another, whether
  • There is very little overlap between the two. the only overlap exists where it is necessary to allow either product to operate independently
  • Services Manager and Rainmaker are complementary :. "Better Together"

It might be useful to start with. Rainmaker explaining this is because it is the product less well known and more recent.

Rainmaker

Citrix was active in the cloud computing space for a long time (several years). Our XenApp and XenDesktop technologies, our excellent performance WAN, and our experience with security and isolation all contribute to our ability to position itself as a leader in the cloud. We made "Desktops as a Service" and "Windows Apps as a service" for almost the entire history of our company. Usually, in the past, these "services" were provided by an IT organization within a company, but our technology is equally suitable for outsourced IT.

Moving to the cloud presents new challenges around space management systems. Multi-tenancy, major large-scale deployments, and security / isolation concerns mean that it is more acceptable to limit the configuration to a single agricultural field. The ratio of users to administrators to be much higher in the cloud space, reduce costs and acceptable margins; this means that we need to automate our systems more, we must allow more self-service, and we must do our configuration more "repeatable". By this I mean that once a configuration has been tested, it should be easy to reproduce in a way that does not challenge the pre-test.

It is certainly possible to use XenApp and other Citrix products today create a successful CSP business. We have now provided guidance in the form of white papers that describe how best to implement, deploy and maintain with XenApp CSP concerns in mind, with appropriate tenant isolation. This is our CSP Reference Architecture. However, following the reference architecture is not always simple. It requires a high degree of knowledge and skills to get the right configuration. Maintenance over time, such as adding and removing servers to handle the load change, or the update servers with a patch, is still a manual process in several stages. The management tools included with XenApp are not aware multi-tenant and therefore do not provide much help determining what services each tenant has, what servers they use, etc. Each of the Citrix product requires a different type of configuration to configure multi-client properly, and there is no protection against a shift as a PCM workload does not correspond to a XenApp working group.

Rainmaker project was created to address these problems. Please note: this is not the final name of the product; just the internal code name. Specifically, the Rainmaker charter is to do three things:

  1. Turn a unique multi-tenancy model for DaaS and Windows-apps-as-a-Service (WAAS)
  2. enable cloud. -Scale DaaS deployments and WAAS. This means several farms, but also in the future, multiple products and multiple versions.
  3. Simplify management and DaaS WaaS within the prescribed CSP Reference Architecture.

Rainmaker these objectives by providing a configuration system that has a multi-tenant data model with flexible insulation concepts at its base (as the option to choose separate isolation procedures per service), a simple user interface, and automated workflows that control XenApp, active Directory, Web interface and other products in the wings.

What Rainmaker does not do is to manage other types of services, other than DaaS and WAAS. Rainmaker has no provision SharePoint sites from users, or ShareFile storage space or SQL databases. It is not intended to do so. Rainmaker can handle insulation services and server supply a hosted Microsoft Outlook but does not support Exchange mailboxes for users who subscribe to Outlook. For this, you should look to CloudPortal Services Manager.

CloudPortal Services Manager

Formerly known as Cortex Control Panel, CloudPortal Services Manager operates at a level above Rainmaker. As the name suggests, it is designed to handle services of all types. It supports many services already, and more can be added via the SDK.

When the Service Manager is used to provide a service for a user, it communicates with the back-end systems using custom business logic for each system, to make the service available to the user. For example, if an Exchange mailbox is provisioned for a user, Service Manager will contact the Exchange to add Inbox. Exchange must already have been pre-configured to be installed, functional and have the proper storage groups. If a fix for Exchange fate, it is up to the administrator to apply the hotfix to all Exchange servers without causing a service interruption.

Service Manager currently supports a limited form of service delivery with XenApp. It can be used for users to provision applications and workstations that have already been published in a XenApp farm. Manage the properties and applications of workstations and servers on which they work must still be done manually outside the Service Manager console.

To summarize, Services Manager is designed for user provisioning services, but it was not designed to install, configure, manage capacity, or manage the lifecycle of these services . For this you must use the console or the configuration tools provided by the services themselves. It would be impossible for the Manager to contain a superset of all configurations provided by all the services it manages. Yet there is an incredible value in the user provisioning appearance as Manager Services offer because it is by far the most common type of change configuration needed on a daily basis, and it is the appearance of the configuration that is naturally adapted to provide self-service.

Better Together

the relationship between Rainmaker and Services Manager, then, is similar to the relationship between Microsoft Exchange Management Console and Service Manager. The first is used to configure and manage the service; it is used to provide the service (already set) for customers, tenants and users, as well as all other types of services.

Using Rainmaker, a CSP administrator can announce desktops and Windows applications as services. They can handle workloads that host these desktops and applications. They can monitor tenants use the applications and users within these tenants use applications. They can manage service updates, such as the deployment of a pack patch or service, without causing service interruptions.

Using Service Manager, an administrator can take CSP desktops and Windows App Services, and delivery to customers, tenants and users. They may delegate what services each tenant is allowed to view or subscribe to. They can combine a Microsoft Outlook WaaS hosted service with Exchange Inbox hosted. They can give their customers and tenants the opportunity to self-service, so that all they need to do is select an application and add users. Service Manager Rainmaker operates under the covers, and Rainmaker fact that these services are properly accommodated, provisioned, and isolated.

The two products really enhance each other and provide an end to end solution for DaaS and WAAS.

... but still good, even outside

If you choose to only use the Service Manager, with limited support provisioning XenApp already available, which continue to be available for you. There is a cost to migrate to Rainmaker and we do not force the person cost. Finally, I believe CSPs will recognize that the benefits of Rainmaker outweigh these costs and will migrate naturally, as they would have migrated to new agricultural versions anyway.

If you already have a control panel and it n 't Service Manager, there are two ways to take advantage of Rainmaker by itself:

  1. Rainmaker SDK will provide with everything needed to integrate all the Control Panel with it. The public SDK Rainmaker will be the same as that used by the Service Manager so that other control panels have the same access to its features.
  2. Rainmaker provide end to end interface for DaaS and WaaS provisioning tenants and end users. It is much more limited than the Service Manager provides, and is able to provide self-service, but it is there to help those control panels are not yet integrated into Rainmaker.

End

I hope that this post was informative and helped reduce some of the confusion about the two products and how they fit together. Keep watching this space for more information on Rainmaker in the future.

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