9.3 VM Life Cycle Management

The Novell ZENworks Orchestrator maintains a library of VM images, hosts, and instances. Like physical resources, VMs can be grouped and they have facts that describe their attributes.

ZENworks orchestrator provides a JDL management API for the following tasks you can use jobs to perform on VMs, as illustrated in the following figure:

Figure 9-2 VM Lifecycle Management

The VM life cycle is divided into two parts: configuration and deployment. Configuration is performed on a VM in the security of a development environment which allows for creation, testing, and modification of the VM until you are ready to launch the VM into the production environment. Deployment is performed in the production environment and the changes take place in real time. As the administrator, you might do both the configuration and deployment tasks.