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.