Data Sheet

IT Operations Management

Data Center Automation

Accelerate cost-efficient, secure IT infrastructure services with out-of-the-box Automated, con­
sistent, and secure—patching, regulatory compliance, and provisioning on a modern containerized
infrastructure. Proven capability managing enterprise scale infrastructure of more than 100k nodes
across multi-vendor physical and virtual servers, databases, and middleware.

Key Features policies to individual resources or resource Key Benefits

groups. Patch remediation can be scheduled
For a complete list of supported devices, • Automate cross-silo, patching, compliance, and
with ongoing Service Level Objectives (SLO) provisioning to achieve high-quality, repeatable
systems, and applications please visit: or run ad hoc. View a full patch history for re- and reliable processes; eliminate errors and
Data Center Automation Documentation sources by policy or individual patches applied. hand-offs between technology silos
• Detect and remediate vulnerability and
Policy-Based Patching of Servers, Patch Database (DB) and Middleware (MW). compliance risks proactively across the
Databases, and Middleware OOTB workflows for patching of DB and MW data center; eliminate inconsistent patching,
Dynamic Patching with Exception Manage­ e.g. Oracle, JBoss, Apache, etc. can be custom- intermittent compliance, and meet Service
ment. Unlike static patching, dynamic patching ized with the workflow design studio. Patch de- Level Objectives
is an implicit list of patches based on vendor ployment can be scheduled with Service Level • Standardize provisioning across multi-vendor
recommendations. Vendor recommended Objectives (SLO) or run ad hoc. Patches may also servers and application infrastructure; eliminate
patches are always changing. Dynamic patch be rolled back using orchestration workflows. error prone manual tasks
policies are much easier to maintain com- • Business value: reduce cost of IT operations,
pared to manually creating explicit lists of Risk Dashboard. The risk dashboard uses accelerate service delivery, reduce risk
static patches. Patching dynamically ensures Common Vulnerability Exposure (CVE) data
you are always patching based on the latest imported from the NVD database to identify
needed patches. DCA queries the vendor spe- patching vulnerabilities across the IT infrastruc-
ture. Resources are evaluated for exposure to all
cific update utilities on the target resource to
known CVEs and results are displayed on the
determine which patches should be applied.
dashboard in various sections. The dashboard
Patch exceptions can be configured to ignore
can be customized to show statistics including
desired patches, e.g., low risk patches on criti-
weekly impact trends and number of affected
cal infrastructure. Service Level Objectives and
resources for vulnerabilities of particular inter-
maintenance schedules ensure patches are
est. Other areas show key information such
applied within a defined frequency and occur as most recent vulnerabilities and affected re-
within scheduled maintenance windows. sources, overall resource count by vulnerability
status, resource type and count by CVE sever-
Patch Operating System (OS). Individual ity e.g. 55 critical CVEs on RHEL resources, and
patches can be downloaded directly from the vulnerabilities by age e.g. 14 resources have had
vendor or imported in multiple formats e.g. an ongoing critical exposure for a period greater
exe, tar, zip, and more. Create custom patch than one year.
policies of various types e.g. recommended,
critical, etc. for various operating systems Agent and agentless operation. Patch re-
such as Windows, RHEL, SOLARIS, and more. sources using agent or agentless based
Attach desired patches to the policy and assign communication.
Data Sheet
Data Center Automation

Ongoing Policy Based Regulatory

Compliance Audit and Remediation for Provisioning
and Configuration Patching Compliance
Servers, Databases, and Middleware
Ongoing, policy based compliance. Service
level objectives (SLO) are defined for each com-
pliance policy. SLO sets a frequency objective for
audit and/or remediation jobs e.g. daily, weekly, or
monthly. Maintenance schedules are created for
resource groups to establish the time period in
which these jobs will be run i.e. Sunday between
12:00am and 6:00am. Orchestration | Analytics | Reporting
Out-of-the-box (OOTB) compliance audit and
remediation content. Pre-built compliance con-
Heterogeneous | Scalable
tent e.g. (CIS, PCI, DSS, SOX, ISO 27001, FISMA,
HIPAA, NERC, and DISA), compliant deployment Physical, Database, Container
templates, and remediation content. Create cus- virtual server middleware server farm
tom benchmarks and policies or modify existing
content. Policies can contain benchmarks for
mixed resource types (e.g. OS, databases, and
middleware) and can be applied to a resource
Container Deployment Foundation
group containing multiple resource types.
Figure 1. Micro Focus DCA framework

Compliant deployments. Deploy compliant

Drill into the dashboard for more detailed in- Provision bare metal. Bare metal servers can
resources e.g. CIS compliant RHEL, Oracle, and
formation including benchmark and resource be provisioned using a PXE boot process.
more. Resources are provisioned with OS or
identification. Customizable detailed and sum- Servers are PXE booted and brought under
Database templates designed to be compliant
mary compliance reports are also available in management using an agent. The customizable
at time of deployment.
PDF format. build plan plan is then deployed which installs
the desired OS.
Puppet integration. DCA discovers Puppet
Agent and agentless operation. Run compli-
managed nodes by communicating with a
ance audit and remediation jobs on resources Provision virtual servers. View an inventory
Puppet Master. Once Puppet nodes are dis-
using agent or agentless based communication. of unmanaged VMware vCenter and Microsoft
covered, DCA discovers OS, DB, and MW
re­s ources on the nodes. Compliance and SCVMM VMs. OS build plans can be configured
patch­ing can be performed on these resour­ Provisioning and Configuration of Servers, to create a VM from a template. When an OS
ces, leveraging the full capability of DCA. Databases, and Middleware build plan is deployed the selected servers are
Quickly identify Puppet managed resources Configure a build plan. Out-of-the-box cus- brought under management and the desired OS
on DCA dashboards and resource lists. tomizable build plans for OS, database, and is installed.
middleware including but not limited to: RHEL,
Compliance reporting. Obtain compliance Solaris, Windows, CentOS, Ubuntu, ESXi, Provision database (DB) and middleware
reports via dashboards available for resource MSSQL, ORACLE, Apache Web Server, Jboss, (MW). Deploy DB and MW workflows to perform
groups, individual resources, and policies. Websphere, and Tomcat Web Server. Build tasks such as: database/middleware provision-
Observe key details on compliance such as plans can be customized to include advanced ing (binaries, instances, and database configura-
compliance status (within or outside of SLO) and configurations such as RAID and BIOS settings. tion), DB upgrades, DB migration to a new server,
identification of failed benchmarks by severity. Configure custom scripts to be run at time of DB utilities (Start/stop instance), and DB and MW
Overall Infrastructure compliance statistics and build to further customize deployments. All pro- code release. Automate tasks including deploy-
metrics are available from the central dashboard. visioning can be scheduled or run ad hoc. ment of MSSQL clusters or Tomcat Web Server.

2
Provision container server farms. Provision commands or retrieve compliance information
Docker-based Kubernetes clusters. Out-of- in the channel. Users are authenticated against
the-box customizable provisioning templates for the DCA IDM using HuBot Enterprise to ensure
Kubernetes/Docker clusters are used to deploy that the slack user has the required permissions
completely configured container infrastructure. to execute the command requested. Invite other
Worker nodes can be provisioned and pointed team members to participate in diagnosis and
to a selected master. remediation of compliance issues in a conversa-
tion-like manner. Obtain resource group compli-
Process Orchestration ance status and information, watch resources for
Orchestration workflows. Thousands of OOTB a change in compliance status, and remediate
workflows are provided to perform orchestrated non-compliance issues from the slack channel.
tasks across the datacenter for servers, data-
base, and middleware. Virtualized Infrastructure Optimization
Performance statistics. View performance,
Orchestrate any provision, patch, or compli- utilization, and capacity of virtual environments.
suite configuration tasks including installs and
ance process. Integrate with 3rd party tools Quickly identify wastage and reduce sprawl
upgrades.
and existing content by creating workflows that caused by idle or oversized VMs.
invoke vendor APIs (SOAP, REST, PowerShell,
High Availability (HA) PostgreSQL clustered
etc.) or open source scripts. Run orchestration Infrastructure planning. Best-fit placement
databases. The DCA suite on CDF uses an em-
workflows using the UI or the open APIs. suggestions for new workloads help determine
bedded HA PostgreSQL cluster which provides where a new VM can be provisioned and how the
resiliency and increased performance capacity.
Create and debug workflows. Create or mod- environment should be sized based on historical
ify workflows using the drag and drop workflow In the event any one pod per PostgreSQL cluster usage trends and available capacity.
studio. Workflows are created with variable fails, DCA services will continue to run without
placeholders for parameter inputs (credentials, disruption. Forecast Reports. Forecast reports use histori-
IPs, etc.) to be highly reusable. Debug and test cal consumption and performance data trends
workflows in the studio before placing them into Scale horizontally. Easily scale DCA for greater to determine the number of days until the re-
production. resource capacity by adding new Kubernetes source will reach capacity.
worker nodes and/or configuring multiple mas-
ter nodes. Worker nodes can be added from
Containerized Suite Deployment Option New Features
the CDF UI. Once credentials are provided for
Container Deployment Foundation (CDF) is the • Containerized suite deployment option
the new worker node, CDF installs Kubernetes/
foundation required to install the new contain-
Docker on the node. When CDF completes the • Service Level Objective (SLO) policy based
erized version of DCA. CDF has a simple install
provisioning of the new worker node it is added dynamic patching and regulatory compliance
process and once installed handles all provi-
to the cluster and begins to accept workloads • Puppet Integration
sioning, orchestration, and management of the
from the master.
underlying core Kubernetes/Docker cluster in- • Dynamic patching with exception management
frastructure. The CDF UI is a single portal used
Headless Operation. Because CDF is built on • CVE Risk Dashboard
for DCA suite and CDF platform management
open APIs, any DCA on CDF feature is available • Compliance Dashboards
tasks such as installs or upgrades.
using RESTful APIs. These APIs enable the full
• Deployment of Docker-based Kubernetes
DCA suite management. Monitor job queues capacity of DCA to be leveraged from any tech- clusters
and check the health and status of individual nology capable of consuming an API.
• APIs for headless operations
service pods from the analytics dashboard.
ChatOps Collaboration • High Availability (HA) with PostgreSQL
Debug issues by viewing log files and con-
clustered databases
figuration files from the UI. Create and man- Collaborate with systems and teams. A Slack
age suite namespaces and perform other channel can be used to run DCA compliance • ChatOps collaboration tool

www.microfocus.com 3
 System Requirements1 Operating Systems
• RHEL x86_64 (ver 7.3)
DCA on CDF Minimum Hardware Requirements • Oracle Enterprise Linux x86_64 (ver 7.3)
• (1 DCA Server) 8 CPU / 32 GB RAM / • CentOS x86_64 (ver 7.3)
200 GB HDD
• (1 NFS Server) 4 CPU / 8 GB RAM / Languages
100 GB HDD • Localization is not supported in DCA

DCA on CDF Recommended High Availability

Hardware Requirements • To provide high availability of
• (1 DCA Server) 4 CPU / 16 GB RAM / components, Kubernetes is used
100 GB HDD in the DCA infrastructure layers.
• (2 Worker Nodes) 4 CPU / 16 GB RAM /
100 GB HDD
• (1 NFS Server) 4 CPU / 8 GB RAM /
100 GB HDD Contact us at:
www.microfocus.com

Express Premium
Provisioning Patching, Ultimate
and compliance and Infrastructure
configuration remediation optimization
Provisioning
Server Discovery, Config, OS Provisioning X X X
and SW Deployment2
Database and Middleware Discovery, X X X
Config and Deployment
Infrastructure3 LCM with Runbook X X X
Automation and Reporting
Compliance
Patching for Server OS X X
and Applications
Server Compliance, Audit and Remediation X X
(+subscription content)
Database and Middleware Patching X X
and Code release
Database and Middleware Compliance, Audit X X
and Remediation (+subscription content)
Database and Middleware X X
Upgrades and Migrations
Optimization
Server Infrastructure Analytics X
Virtual Infrastructure Capacity and Optimization X
Planning and Forecasting X

Figure 2. Three editions to meet infrastructure management needs

__________

1 Other DCA suite products, and classic install

products have different requirements. For a
full list of requirements including network and
tuning please see product documentation.
2 Capability for clustered DB/MW instances
offered in DCA Premium.
3 Infrastructure includes Servers (Physical or
Virtual), Database & Middleware, no platform
or scale restrictions.

360-000114-002 | 8644 | H  |  03/18  |  © 2018 Micro Focus. All rights reserved. Micro Focus and the Micro Focus logo, among others, are trademarks or
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