Control Center Functionality

The Control Center software provides the infrastructure automation services required to manage and deploy logical server farms within an I-Fabric. At a high level, the Control Center manages the logical-to-physical mappings between a logical server farm and the physical resources assigned to it. The Control Center understands the physical topology of the resources deployed within the I-Fabric and provides the capability to deploy and configure these devices to unique topologies and configurations to match account-specific designs created in the Control Center.

The Control Center provides six key areas of infrastructure automation services:

• Provisioning and configuration services

• Flexing services

• Software image management services

• Monitoring services

• Physical infrastructure management services

Each of these five capabilities is built on a foundation of I-Fabric and security technologies that are leveraged by each service area.

Provisioning and Configuration

The ability to automatically provision and configure resources within the resource pool of an I-Fabric is a core capability of the Control Center. The following summary of the steps required to activate a logical server farm should help you understand the provisioning and configuration process.

1. Allocate – The control center dispatches requests to the provisioning server to provision and configure resources. When this request is received, the Control Center performs resource allocation. Resources are randomly allocated from the resource pool and tracked within the CPDB. IP subnets can be allocated from both public and private IP address spaces.

2. Wiring – Following the physical allocation of resources, the network fabrics for Ethernet connections are configured. This process includes configuring network resources such as IP subnets and VLANs. Images are copied to the servers at this time.

3. Dispatch – Following the virtual wiring of the logical server farm, DHCP and DNS services are initiated. The Control Center automates the configuration and management of these services. When these services are available, the devices within the logical server farm are powered up through addressable power devices.

4. Activate – On activation, the logical server farm is monitored to enable automated failover services.

   The Control Center manages and automates the ongoing evolution of logical server farms as well as their initial activation. As resources are added to or deleted from logical server farms, the Control Center continues to manage and automatically configure all wiring as well as DHCP and DNS services.

Flexing

Flexing is the ability to add or delete capacity on a logical server farm. N1 Provisioning Server software rapidly and automatically provisions and configures resources. You can apply flexing to address temporary surges in demand or to adjust capacity on a long-term basis. In either case, flexing enables you to employ infrastructure resources more efficiently. The N1 Provisioning Server software provides two types of flexing services:

• Adding and deleting individual servers within a logical server farm

• Adding and deleting server groups through a server group mechanism

You can add or delete servers from an active logical server farm at any time. Servers are added from the Control Center by dragging the server icon into the existing logical server farm design and attaching it to the appropriate subnet. All DNS and DHCP services are automatically configured. Adding an additional server does not require you to reinitiate the farm activation process. You also can delete servers by using the Control Center.

The server group is a unique logical structure supported within N1 Provisioning Server software. Server groups enable rapid flexing of servers by associating a predefined role or image for all servers within the group. All servers in a server group are considered identical and start off with the same software image. This software image is a global image that is replicated for every server within the server group.

When a server group is flexed up, the global image associated with the server group is automatically stored onto each server added to the group. Although you can make changes to individual servers within a server group, those changes will not be reflected in a flex operation unless you have updated the designated global image. When a server group is flexed down, the servers and their associated storage are returned to the resource pool. Server group flexing is done through the Control Center server configuration dialog box.

Software Image Management

The Control Center manages software images, and the configurations of servers and switches. The Control Center supports creation and management of two categories of images: global and account images.

• Global images typically contain baseline operating systems and monitoring software that have been configured to work with an I-Fabric. The purpose of deploying global images is to make available a set of baseline boot images that are accessible across different accounts and different farms in an I-Fabric. Based on the global images, you can then create new server images for subsequent modification and configuration. You must have administrator-level access to the N1 Provisioning Server to create global images. You can create global images only through the Control Center CLI. In addition to an operating system and monitoring software, you might choose to include other software components in an image.

  An I-Fabric supports images based on the Solaris 8, Solaris 9, and Red Hat^TM Linux 2.1 operating environments.

• Account images are for a particular account and consist of account-specific customizations of one of the following items:

  • Global images

  • Blank disks

  • Application and data images

  These images are the result of a snapshot of a disk in use within a logical server farm. The resulting images are available for use by farms within an account. Images that have account-specific software can be either global or account images. Their classification depends on their manner of creation. that is, whether they are created from modifications of an existing global image or from the snapshot of a disk in use within a logical server farm. Thus, you can create identical images by both methodologies, and the images are considered distinct solely on the basis of their methods of creation.

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  Note –

  The N1 Provisioning Server software package comes with baseline Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 operating system images that you can copy using the snapshot tool and customize.

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Using the snapshot tool available from the Control Center, you can capture software images to be stored in an image library and use them to subsequently configure similar devices. You can use these images for global or account images. A disk snapshot is the logical equivalent of making a master copy of a local disk image. The original image is stored in an image library and a reference to the image is entered in the CPDB. Depending on the I-Fabric configuration, images reside on the local disk or on a remote NFS file server. Snapshot images are named and catalogued in the Control Center image library. The image library is listed in the Control Center server configuration dialog box. You can choose from prebuilt images to be associated with a server or server group.

You can take a snapshot of any software image associated with any server (individual servers as well as a specific server within a server group). The snapshot function automatically shuts the server down to ensure that the resulting image is a stable, production-ready replication of the original image. After the snapshot is completed, the Control Center reboots the server automatically.

The snapshot function enables functionality such as server flexing and server failover. If a server fails, the system can automatically replace the failed server with a substitute by using the last snapshot of the failed server to create the image for the new server.

Monitoring

The Control Center actively monitors the state and health of devices in an I-Fabric. Monitoring provides visibility of an I-Fabric and supports failover and recovery or to restart failed processes.

The Control Center enables the following farm monitoring capabilities within an I-Fabric:

• Availability of resource pool devices (server farms) to enable automatic failover and availability of these devices for display in the Control Center monitoring screen.

• Basic performance monitors (disk, CPU, memory) for servers. You can display the monitoring information in the Control Center.

• Changes in farm or device status, state, and configuration that is recorded in event logs and optionally can be made available externally using Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) traps.

  • Events in monitoring farm state changes include activating, deactivating, and placing a farm in standby mode.

  • Events in farm configuration changes include adding, removing, and reconfiguring farm servers.

  • Events in device state changes and failures include server UP and server DOWN messages.

• Messages for events comprise three categories:

  • Informational messages, such as device availability or failure

  • Farm messages related to devices of a specific farm

  • Billing messages

Monitoring messages are forwarded to the service processor. The service processor then sends the messages to a central message repository in the CPDB. You can view monitoring data using the Control Center monitoring screen. You can also configure monitoring events for farm server utilization, such as disk and CPU, by using the Control Center monitoring screen.

Optionally, you can configure the CPDB to forward messages to an external network management system (NMS). An SNMP connection and a management information base (MIB) extension are required for forwarding messages to an external NMS.

Additional tools for monitoring system health include operating system and Control Center commands. For details regarding system health monitoring, see Chapter 4, Monitoring and Messaging in N1 Provisioning Server 3.1, Blades Edition, System Administration Guide.

Physical Infrastructure Management

As a part of the N1 Provisioning Server initialization process, the Control Center performs resource and wiring validation. This validation enables the Control Center to have a complete physical topology map of all resources within an I-Fabric. The wiring validation provides an automated way of confirming the physical wiring map of equipment in a given data center. The Control Center's ability to successfully manage the virtual wiring of a logical server farm relies on the integrity of the physical wiring of the resources within an I-Fabric. Automating this physical wiring validation removes a common source of errors in an I-Fabric, namely the potential for human error caused by incorrectly cabling the physical infrastructure.

The Control Center uses this wiring data to make resource allocation decisions. Physical infrastructure data is stored in a database that you can access using the Control Center CLI.