Work Journal for Sept. 19th 2013
I'm caught in work limbo again. Over the weekend I became so annoyed at waiting around for Wendel to send me updates for the custom CLM class that I decided to go back to work this week. I didn't want to burn another week of vacation time waiting for a response that will never come.
I decided to start working on updating the CLM ILT to version 3.1. Much of what I was going to add was already done in the custom course anyways, so it was only a matter of integrating it into the existing material. After that, however, things started getting more difficult. The biggest feature of 3.1 is Quickstart. When I first heard of this feature I thought I would need to seriously reevaluate how the class was structured. When I started playing with the new version myself, I became more skeptical.
The problem is that while Quickstart does deal with some of the more complex issues, it does so in such a limited way that I feel it's almost not worth bothering. Quickstart does make configuring a new vCenter or Amazon instance much more straightforward, but new service instances may only be created from existing templates. Granted, those services can be easily edited manually at a later time. This doesn't eliminate the need to teach how to build a new service instance from scratch. In fact, there are cases you might not want to use Quickstart for this purpose. For the moment, I'm unsure if services created using Quickstart are always immediately requestable, or may be created but not requestable I suspect the latter is the case, as the linkage to an entitlement package occurs later.
The real sticky question is tenants and users. In the 3.0 class, creating a Tenant and users required two modules. One to just create the necessary tree of data structures, and another to assign them resources to use. Quickstart can do all that very, very quickly. There's a large number of fields (region, site, etc.) that Quickstart does not request. I'm unsure if that means that they are auto-populated, or they were simply deemed unnecessary when it comes to cloud. After all, we inherited that data structure from AR System. While I can see why one would want that, it just doesn't seem to be as important when it comes ot hybrid cloud operations. Segementing users by role and entitlement are much more important than all the little details. The question remains, however, why wouldn't you use Quickstart for tenants and users?
The only real snag seems to be when you initially set up the system. You still need to enter a provider company to operate the cloud instance. I don't believe that Quickstart alone does that for you. Once you're past that, I can't imagine why you wouldn't use Quickstart except for exceptional circumstances. In that case, shouldn't I be deleting or otherwise scaling back some of the module content? I really could use Wendel's input on this...
