Overview of Sun N1 Service Provisioning System

The N1 SPS product is an object oriented, XML-based, distributed environment to solve enterprise system configuration, service provisioning, and application deployment needs. The provisioning system provides an extensible framework and environment that at a minimum provides the following functionality:

• Common framework to build service provisioning automation – The provisioning system provides an XML schema and a Java API that enable you to model your applications and services and automate the deployment of these objects.

• Maintains an audit log of changes over time – The provisioning system Run History and Where Installed plans enable you to track the status of deployments in your network, as well as the target hosts of those deployments.

• Compares the current state of target hosts with their expected state – You can use the provisioning system to capture snapshots of the target hosts on your network, and run a variety of comparisons through the browser interface or the cmp command.

• Simulates a change to identify configuration problems – The preflight run option enables you to simulate your deployment plans. If you encounter deployment issues, you can safely troubleshoot and resolve these problems without adversely affecting your target hosts.

• Implements a set of rules to govern automation execution – In your provisioning plans, you can specify individual hosts or host sets to provision with the platform and limitToHostSet attributes to the component element.

• Notifies system administrators of problems and actions– You can use the <sendCustomEvent> step to generate a particular message each time a component is deployed or a plan is run. This step can be used in conjunction with the notification rules module to send an email any time this step is encountered on a particular host.

• Automatically manages version control– As you modify and check-in your components and plans, the provisioning system software versions the new component or plan, while preserving older versions.

The N1 SPS software implements a distributed environment in which object-oriented components are authored in XML scripts and orchestrated to follow execution plans for distribution, provisioning, and installation needs. For more information about N1 SPS basic concepts and terminology, see Chapter 1, Sun N1 Service Provisioning System 5.2 Overview, in Sun N1 Service Provisioning System 5.2 Installation Guide.