Description Languages

A logical server farm within an I-Fabric is constructed from a number of basic building blocks. Capturing a logical description of these building blocks and their interrelationships enables the creation of a digital blueprint that specifies a farm's logical structure. This logical blueprint facilitates the automation of many manual tasks involved in constructing logical server farms.

N1 Provisioning Server software uses the following three description languages to capture logical descriptions of server farms:

• Farm Mark-Up Language (FML)

  FML is an XML dialect used to represent the logical blueprint of a logical server farm. FML is scalable and capable of describing, with a high degree of abstraction, network and configuration data for servers within a logical server farm.

  The general structure of FML is to describe an I-Fabric as a structure composed of sets of devices that have both connectivity as well as configuration-related information. The connectivity information describes how these various devices are interconnected, for example, how device Ethernet ports are connected to specific subnets and VLANs. In addition to devices and their interconnectivity, FML provides the ability to describe roles that servers may occupy within a logical server farm, for example, a web server, database server, and application server. This ability enables the Control Center to deploy multiple instances of a given server within a logical server farm.

  FML also enables the replication of entire logical server farms. Such replication might be required for creating site mirrors at different geographic locations, implementing business continuance solutions, or for creating a testing and staging area for a future version of a logical server farm.

• Monitoring Mark-Up Language (MML)

  MML is an XML dialect that describes monitor deployments and configurations as defined using the Control Center. MML describes monitoring configurations as they pass from the control center to the provisioning server.

• Wiring Mark-Up Language (WML)

  WML is an XML dialect that describes the physical wiring characteristics within an I-Fabric. WML is also used to describe the physical wiring of an I-Fabric. The difference between FML and WML is that FML describes the logical device wiring of a logical server farm and layout, whereas WML describes the physical wiring of all the devices present within an I-Fabric.