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Cisco Intersight™ Workload Optimizer is a multicloud application resource management solution that visualizes complex interdependencies across all layers of infrastructure and makes recommendations to ensure the user experience at the lowest cost.
Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer is a real-time decision engine that drives continuous health of your applications across your on-premises and public cloud environments. Intersight Workload Optimizer continuously analyzes workload consumption, costs, and policy constraints across the full stack, from applications to infrastructure, and automatically scales resources in real-time to ensure application performance.
Automating the decision-making process with Intersight Workload Optimizer enables the stack to adjust to the dynamic demands of the workload through abstraction and analytics. The software can determine when, where, and how to move and resize workloads, maximize elasticity with public cloud resources, and quickly model infrastructure and workload growth scenarios to determine how much infrastructure you will need and when you will need it, ensuring application performance and reducing costs.
With Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer, IT operations teams can simplify and automate application resource management at scale and ensure performance with a single solution that provides full-stack visibility of applications and the underlying infrastructure, intelligent insights, and automated actions. You can also reduce cost and preserve capital by increasing resource utilization on-premises and in the cloud, without overprovisioning.
Table 1. Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer
| Use case |
Benefit |
| Ensure application performance |
Ensure your business-critical applications automatically get the resources they need to perform |
| Safely increase infrastructure utilization |
Eliminate infrastructure as the cause of application performance degradation, without overprovisioning |
| Improve IT staff productivity |
Simplify complex tasks, automate decision-making, and gain time to innovate |
| Accelerate and de-risk multicloud projects |
Safely and efficiently migrate workloads from on premises to the public cloud, and vice versa, to minimize cost and maximize efficiency |
| Optimize public cloud |
Scale cloud resources according to actual application demand, so your applications always perform without overprovisioning or overspending in the cloud |
Simplify application resource management and lower costs
| Feature |
Benefit |
| Full stack visibility |
Obtain visibility and insights across the entire application and infrastructure stack. Integrates through APIs with APM, PaaS, container management, hybrid cloud, SDDC, public cloud, on-premises compute, network, and storage |
| Application-driven resourcing |
Automatically manage infrastructure resources (including on-premises, container, and cloud) based on real-time application demand. Software drives continuous application performance. |
| Supply chain representation of application and infrastructure entities |
Models your environment as a market of buyers and sellers linked together in a supply chain. The supply chain represents the flow of resources from the data center, through the physical tiers into the virtual tier and out to the cloud. The supply chain provides a view of closed-loop management of resources, from the data center, cloud, containers, through to the application. |
| Continuous cloud catalog discovery |
Cloud providers continuously update their expansive catalog (millions of possible configurations) of service types, discounting mechanisms, and configuration options. Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer continuously and automatically recognizes new additions or changes to cloud catalogs through APIs. All optimization actions are based on the latest offerings and your existing agreements with your cloud providers. |
| Continuous cloud optimization |
Continuously optimize cloud compute, storage, and database resources based on application demand. Eliminate idle and forgotten assets with real-time insight into the cloud environment. |
| Reserved Instance (RI) analytics and optimization |
Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer provides specific and automatable actions that identify which RIs to apply to which instances and does so in concert with resizing actions, ensuring that you continuously get the most out of your prepurchase investments. |
| Integration with Kubernetes |
Integrate and manage performance of all upstream versions of Kubernetes, including OpenShift, Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, and Google GKE. IWO complements kubernetes orchestrator for initial planning and placement of container pods, on going right-size and resource allocation for the pods. This integration will provide day 1 and day 2 capabilities for container deployments. |
| Integration with APM Solutions |
Integrate with major APM solutions such as AppDynamics®, Dynatrace, New Relic, and Microsoft Azure Application Insights. Discover application entities as business application, business transaction, service, and application components. Display in the supply chain with application metrics and view infrastructure dependencies and risks back to the applications. |
| Agentless installation |
Get agentless platform installs and, through APIs, discover infrastructure and cloud resources within minutes |
| Integrate with hypervisors |
Integrate with leading hypervisors such as VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEL) and more |
| Integrate with storage platforms |
Integrate with leading storage platforms as Dell EMC, Pure Storage, NetApp, and more. |
| Workflow integration |
Integrate with ServiceNow for better collaboration between IT and application development teams. Application developers and IT teams can collaborate, approve, and track changes based on Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer actions. |
Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer automatically manages compute, storage, and network resources across all major IT platforms and multicloud environments. It leverages telemetry data from a broad third-party ecosystem, supporting numerous targets across a range of hypervisors, compute platforms (including Cisco UCS® and HyperFlex™), container platforms, public clouds and more, to deliver intelligent recommendations based on a holistic view, for where to place and how to size and scale resources. Please refer to the Intersight Workload Optimizer Target Configuration Guide for additional information.
Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer uses a subscription-based licensing model with multiple tiers. Customers can purchase a subscription duration of one, three, or five years and choose the tier they need for the selected subscription duration. The unit of measure is the number of virtual-machine instances or of virtual desktop instances. Workload Optimizer is a SaaS-only offer.
Customers can purchase one of the following licensing tiers depending on their needs.
Table 2. Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer licensing tiers
| License tier |
Description |
| Essentials |
Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer Essentials enables customers to optimize hybrid cloud infrastructure both on premises and in public clouds
● Compute, hyperconverged systems, hypervisors, storage, and network devices are supported in this tier
● On-going optimization, capacity planning, workload placement, and automation of recommendations actions for hybrid cloud infrastructures are supported
|
| Advantage |
The Advantage tier provides all of the functionality in Essentials tier plus:
● Extension of support for containers, packaged applications and databases, and workflow integration with full-stack optimization and automation
◦ Container (Kubernetes) pod and resource optimization (horizontal and vertical scaling, sizing and placement)
◦ Database servers and services
◦ Application servers and application performance management (AppDynamics) integrations
|
| Premier |
The Premier tier provides all of the functionality in Essentials and Advantage tiers plus:
● Extension of functionalities to ingest, visualize, and correlate data from third-party APM tools and open source/API-based proprietary tools for an end-to-end view of the network
|
Information about Cisco’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives and performance is provided in Cisco’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and sustainability reporting.
Table 3. Cisco environmental sustainability information
| Sustainability topic |
Reference |
|
| General |
Information on product-material-content laws and regulations |
|
| Information on electronic waste laws and regulations, including our products, batteries, and packaging |
||
| Sustainability Inquiries |
Contact: csr_inquiries@cisco.com |
|
Intersight assist
Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer enables you to add on-premises targets using Intersight Assist. A data center could have multiple devices that do not connect directly with Cisco Intersight. Any device that is supported by Cisco Intersight but does not connect directly with it, will need a connection mechanism. Cisco Intersight Assist provides that connection mechanism and helps you add devices into Cisco Intersight. It is a deployable virtual machine contained within an Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) file format. You can install the appliance on VMware ESXi 6.5 or higher.
Resource requirements for Intersight Assist are listed below. Note that Intersight Assist with a “tiny” deployment type is for the orchestration feature only. For Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer, you can choose between small, medium, and large types based on workload.
Table 4. Resource and system requirements
| Resource requirement |
System requirements |
|
|
|
Small |
Medium |
| vCPU |
16 |
24 |
| RAM GiB) |
32 |
64 |
| Storage (disk in GiB) |
500 |
500 |
| Deploy configuration (only for Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer) |
Up to 1000 virtual machines |
Up to 30,000 virtual machines |
| Supported hypervisors |
VMware ESXi 6.5 and higher |
|
Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer licenses can be ordered for one-year, three-year, and five-year subscription periods. In addition, volume discounts are available for customers ordering more than 2000 virtual-machine (or VDI-instance) subscriptions at the same time. Cisco® Smart Accounts and Smart Licensing are mandatory for Cisco Intersight. In addition, a Cisco ID is required to use the Cisco Intersight user interface. Please contact your Cisco sales representative or Cisco partner with questions or to place your order.
Table 5. Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer ordering information
| Part # |
Description |
| DC-MGT-SAAS |
Product family – Cisco Intersight |
| DC-MGT-WO-SAAS-ES |
Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer SaaS – Essentials |
| DC-MGT-WOD-SAAS-ES |
Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer VDI SaaS – Essentials |
| DC-MGT-WO-SAAS-AD |
Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer SaaS – Advantage |
| DC-MGT-WOD-SAAS-AD |
Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer VDI SaaS – Advantage |
| DC-MGT-WO-SAAS-PR |
Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer SaaS – Premier |
| DC-MGT-WOD-SAAS-PR |
Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer VDI SaaS – Premier |
Cisco environmental sustainability
Information about Cisco’s environmental sustainability policies and initiatives for our products, solutions, operations, and extended operations or supply chain is provided in the “Environment Sustainability” section of Cisco’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Report.
Reference links to information about key environmental sustainability topics (mentioned in the “Environment Sustainability” section of the CSR Report) are provided in the following table:
| Sustainability topic |
Reference |
| Information on product material content laws and regulations |
|
| Information on electronic waste laws and regulations, including products, batteries, and packaging |
Cisco makes the packaging data available for informational purposes only. It may not reflect the most current legal developments, and Cisco does not represent, warrant, or guarantee that it is complete, accurate, or up to date. This information is subject to change without notice.
Cisco Services for Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer
Cisco Customer Experience (CX) offers a variety of services to accelerate time to value for Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer. Cisco CX leverages Cisco best practices to deliver training content and expert resources on demand, empowering customers to quickly realize the value of Intersight Workload Optimizer. Cisco CX offers guidance for getting to results with service offerings ranging from deployment to helping customers who want to expand their solution with sophisticated automation or customized integrations
For more information, contact your Cisco sales representative or learn more.
Flexible payment solutions to help you achieve your objectives
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Intelligent, proactive resource optimization simplifies and automates operations
Simplify application resource management across your complex hybrid cloud environment with Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer. With real-time, full-stack visibility across your applications and infrastructure, it continuously monitors and optimizes resource allocations and workload placement to ensure performance, lower on-premises and cloud costs, and free your time to focus on what matters. For additional information please visit:
● Intersight Workload Optimizer web page