IBM Turbonomic Glossary

SSH is a software package that enables secure system administration and file transfers over insecure networks. In SSH, all user authentication, commands, output, and file transfers are encrypted to protect against attacks in the network. Tatu Ylonen developed the SSH protocol in 1995 in response to the hacking of the Finnish university network

To administer the Turbonomic platform at the OS or container level, you can use SSH sessions on the hosting VM. 

Supercluster is a term that refers to the results of a Merge placement policy. This Merge policy joins two or more clusters into a single group of providers. This enables Turbonomic to move workload from a host in one of the clusters to a host in any of the merged clusters.

By default, Turbonomic respects boundaries inherent in your environment, such as cluster boundaries or networks. A supercluster provides more choices for workload placement.

See also Cluster

In Turbonomic, the Supply Chain is the full stack of entities in your IT environment, placed in buyer/seller relationships with each other, where some entities provide resources while others consume the supplied resources.

Turbonomic uses Targets to discover the entities in your environment and stitch them together into a Supply Chain, and it displays the Supply Chain in an organizer that you can use to view the relationships or set session scope. With the Supply Chain, you can see at a glance how resource issues impact the full stack of your IT environment.

Swagger refers to the set of tools that you can use to implement APIs using the OpenAPI specification.  Turbonomic uses the SwaggerGUI as one way to deliver documentation for the Turbonomic API.

A Target is a resource or workload management service in your virtual environment that you have connected to Turbonomic. For example, a public cloud account on AWS (Amazon Web Services) can be a target, as can an on-prem datacenter managed by VMware vCenter Server.

For each target that you configure, Turbonomic communicates with the service via the management protocol that it exposes — a REST API, SMI-S, XML, or some other management transport. Turbonomic uses this communication to discover the managed entities, monitor resource utilization, and execute actions.

Virtual CPU (VCPU) (also known as Virtual Processor) is a measure of the CPU resources on a VM. VCPU is typically expressed in a VM as the number of cores. Turbonomic measures allocated VCPU capacity and utilized VCPU in hertz of processing power (GHz or MHz).

For on-prem environments, VCPU capacity is a percentage of the CPU capacity of the underlying host (see CPU).

For cloud VMs, the VCPU capacity is determined by the instance type and the CPU options you specify upon instance launch. For example, an Azure Standard_D2_v2 instance has a default of two VCPU cores. Turbonomic discovers the VCPU capacity and expresses it as GHz of processing power.

A Virtual Datacenter (vDC) is a collection or pool of resources that groups the resources around specific requirements or business needs. These vDCs can implement boundaries for a private cloud infrastructure, and then can establish Tenant groups on that infrastructure.

Turbonomic discovers vDCs for Private Cloud environments. The private cloud infrastructure provides resources to the cloud, and to the workloads that run on the cloud. To manage these resources, private clouds organize the infrastructure into Provider and Consumer vDCs. A Provider vDC is a collection of physical resources (hosts and datastores) within the cloud stack. A Consumer vDC is a collection of resources that are available to tenant customers so they can manage their workloads. A Consumer vDC uses the resources supplied by a Provider vDC.

For container environments, if you deployed Kubeturbo 7.22.0 or earlier, Turbonomic uses vDCs in the supply chain to represent a Kubernetes Namespace, or a Cloud Foundry Org. 

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure  (VDI) is a technology that allows virtual machines to provide and manage virtual desktops. VDI hosts desktop environments on a centralized server and deploys them to end users on request. 

Turbonomic integrates with Horizon VDI so customers can apply our Application Resource Management to maximize the value of their VDI deployment.

A Virtual Machine (VM) is a software emulation of a physical computer that can run programs or applications. For an on-prem environment, one or more VMs can run as guests on a single physical machine. 

For a public cloud environment, virtual machines run in cloud regions. Each VM is a unique machine with its own CPU, memory, network, and storage resources, as well as its own OS.

Turbonomic can discover and manage VMs that run in on-prem and public cloud environments.

For Kubernetes environments, Turbonomic discovers the nodes that provide resources to containers, and presents them as virtual machines in the supply chain.