N1 Provisioning Server Software

The N1 Provisioning Server software resides on the control plane server and provides the infrastructure automation services required to manage and deploy logical server farms within an I-Fabric. At a high level, the N1 Provisioning Server software manages the logical-to-physical mappings between a logical server farm and the physical resources assigned to it.

N1 Provisioning Server software comprises the following roles and software components:

• Segment manager, which controls and coordinates activities for an I-Fabric

• Farm manager, which monitors activities related to logical server farms

• Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) and Domain Name Server (DNS) services

• Monitoring software, which monitors the health and state of an I-Fabric and the logical server farms within it

• Storage manager client (STMC), an interface required by the farm manager to access storage functionality

• Control plane database (CPDB), which is a persistent, central repository of data

• The image server, which manages images. The image server can be any stand-alone server that supports network file server (NFS), or it can reside on the control plane server.

N1 Provisioning Server software provides six key areas of infrastructure automation services:

• Provisioning and configuration services

• Flexing services

• Software image management services

• Monitoring and messaging services

• Failure and recovery services

• Physical infrastructure management services

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 N1 Provisioning Server. The N1 Provisioning Server manages and automates the ongoing evolution of logical server farms and their initial activation. As resources are added or deleted on server farms, the N1 Provisioning Server continues to manage and automatically configure all virtual wiring as well as DHCP and DNS services.

Flexing

Flexing enables you to add or delete capacity on a farm. N1 Provisioning Server software automatically provisions and configures resources. 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

Software Image Management

The N1 Provisioning Server manages software images and configurations of servers. The N1 Provisioning Server supports creation and management of two categories of images: global images and account images.

• Global images consist of the operating system (including patches and service packs), integrated N1 Provisioning Server agents, and certain customizations. Global images may also contain applications. At the very least, the customizations are modifications that make images compatible with an I-Fabric. You also may choose to customize images with account-specific software and data.

• Account images are for a particular account and consist of account-specific customizations of global images, blank disks, or application and data images.

I-Fabric Monitoring

The N1 Provisioning Server actively monitors the state and health of devices in an I-Fabric. Monitoring provides visibility of an I-Fabric and supports failover and recovery of devices or the restarting of failed processes.

Failure and Recovery of Devices in the Resource Pool

The N1 Provisioning Server automatically detects and then replaces failed devices in the resource pool, such as resource pool servers and load balancers. The failed device is replaced with a device of the same type from the available devices in the resource pool. The replacement device automatically takes on the network configuration of the failed device.

Load Balancer Failover Modes

Load balancers support the following failover modes:

• Path failover

• Device failover or high availability (HA)

• Single device failover (non-HA)

A path failover occurs when one interface to the router fails. In that case, the path on the failed interface is automatically restored on the live interface. In a high availability setup, one load balancer device is on standby as the secondary load balancer, while the primary, active load balancer device handles processing. If the primary load balancer fails, the secondary load balancer automatically takes over processing. A single device failover situation is resolved manually through the replaceFailedDevice tool.

Physical Infrastructure Management

As a part of the N1 Provisioning Server initialization process, the N1 Provisioning Server performs resource and wiring validation. This validation enables the CPDB to have a complete physical topology map of all resources within the I-Fabric. The wiring validation provides an automated way of confirming the physical wiring map of all devices within an I-Fabric. The integrity of the physical wiring of the resources within an I-Fabric enables the N1 Provisioning Server to successfully manage the virtual wiring of a logical server farm.