Learning about the UIM service life cycle

An infrastructure service is a cluster of servers packaged together with the network and storage resources required to enable the cluster. Unified Infrastructure Manager/Provisioning Center provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for Vblock systems:

This lifecycle shows the overview of the service lifecycle as it pertains to an infrastructure service. It starts off as a generic template. The catalog displays a list of all templates (offerings). Based on the current need, selecting the proper template (offering) will allow the administrator to create the desired infrastructure service for provisioning.

As mentioned before, Service Offering is a template. Within the template, there are minimum and maximum allocations that can be used. For example, you can have a template that allows a minimum of 2 and a maximum of 8 blades.

Service offering also identifies whether an OS will be installed with the infrastructure service, and if yes, then which OS...