Overview

This section provides a brief overview of the I-Fabric components and the N1 Provisioning Server software. For a detailed description, please refer to the N1 Provisioning Server 3.1, Blades Edition, System Administration Guide.

An I-Fabric (Infrastructure Fabric) combines computing, storage, and networking resources into a contiguous infrastructure that you deploy and repurpose to meet changing requirements. An I-Fabric is controlled and managed by the N1 Provisioning Server Software.

I-Fabric Components

An I-Fabric integrates otherwise individual, heterogeneous networks, servers, storage, and infrastructure devices into a coordinated, automated fabric. This fabric enables easy management, deployment, and redeployment of logical server farms. An I-Fabric is made up of three functional areas:

• Control plane – The control plane consists of the N1 Provisioning Server software and the associated server hardware on which the software is deployed.

• Fabric layer – The fabric layer contains the networking infrastructure and switching fabric. This layer enables the software in the control plane to dynamically create, manage, and change the networking and security boundaries of logical server farms.

• Resource layer – The resource layer consists of infrastructure resources such as blade servers and load balancers. The resource layer of an I-Fabric contains the infrastructure resources you may provision to logical server farms.

The control, fabric, and resource layers work together to dynamically create logical server farms. A logical server farm is the fundamental structure deployed and managed within an I-Fabric. The N1 Provisioning Server software allocates logical server farms from the pool of resources available within the resource layer. Secure partitions enforced by the software and methodologies enable you to exercise independent administrative control over each logical server farm. Although you can have administrative access on all devices within a logical server farm, you cannot view, access, or modify the devices or data associated with a different logical server farm unless you have the appropriate permission.

The N1 Provisioning Server software provides a comprehensive set of infrastructure automation and management capabilities. The software comprises two primary components: the N1 Provisioning Server and the Control Center.

• The N1 Provisioning Server is the core automation component and provides the interface between the Control Center and the physical infrastructure resources.

• The Control Center is the web browser-based graphical user interface (GUI) that enables design, configuration, and ongoing management of logical server farms.

N1 Provisioning Server Software

The N1 Provisioning Server software provides the infrastructure automation services required to manage and deploy logical server farms within an I-Fabric. The N1 Provisioning Server software manages the logical-to-physical mappings between a logical server farm and the physical resources that are assigned to the server farm.

The N1 Provisioning Server software contains the following software subsystems.

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

• The image server, if you have a local storage configuration, which manages images. The image server can be either an NFS or an FTP file server. The image server can run on an control plane server or on a stand-alone server.

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

The Control Center is the user interface to the control plane software from which you deploy and manage logical server farms. The Control Center is the primary farm management tool. See Chapter 2, Control Center Application Overview for an overview of the Control Center Management GUI.