Towards adopting a tooldriven, integrated and automated change management process for virtual machine provisioning

Integrating legacy applications and establishing automated process flows often is a main requirement while establishing an effective IT service management (ITSM) system on historically grown and functionally separated organizations. The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ, Leibniz-Rechenzentrum) as the main IT service provider for all universities in the area of Munich (Bavaria, Germany) handles IT services for more than 100,000 academic customers. Therefore the LRZ launched an ITSM project and aims to become one of the first ISO/IEC 20000 certified academic IT service providers. As a first pilot service for establishing a change management process, the ITSM working group at the LRZ chose the provisioning of virtual machines. On one hand the attention was turned on implementing an ISO/IEC 20000 compliant process model as well as the integration of legacy tools and applications. Another important requirement is the automation of the process, as the number of hosted virtual machines continual grows. This paper gives a hint on structuring legacy workflows and shows a way to describe them sufficiently. It is shown how to apply concepts on legacy applications and describes some challenges in implementing such an integrated and automated ITSM process.