Functional breakdown of virtualization offerings
In a previous post I tried to capture the functions required to manage datacenters and services across their lifecycle. In a subsequent one, I tried to map the VMWare virtual infrastructure 3 functions. Obviously, the granularity was not the right one. Below is another attempt to capture what the holistic management offering should be :
Hardware Management
Not specific to the virtualization domain, but critical to have an end to end solution. Usually, this part is implemented with solutions like IBM Director, N1 System Manager, or HP Insight Manager. However, one of the many issues when done in a virtualization setup is the control of virtual machines in a way similar to physical machines (with a virtual IPMI implementation for example).
- HW Discovery: This is discovery of bare metal systems using IPMI or other vendor specific baseboard interfaces. The machine does not need to have an OS, or Domain 0 to be discovered.
- FW Update: Update of the BIOS or other hardware specific software. Usually requires some tight integration with hardware management interfaces.
- HW Monitoring : Monitoring of environmental information like fan speed, CPU temperature ...
- Hardware Abstraction Layer : A kind of driver layer allowing to decouple the hardware specific functions from the various protocols or vendor interfaces. Critical to be able to, for example, configure the machine to boot by using PXE.
Hypervisor
the central piece of the virtualization offering, this could be Xen or VMWare ESX for example. This layer is now a commodity and offered for free as part of the OS.
Virtual Server Management
Functions usually implemented in the Domaine 0 (aka Host OS, or Service Partition).
- Virtual Device Management : Management of devices exported to Virtual Machines. This includes network, disks, PCI devices, consoles, ... this function is usually highly tied to the hypervisor and share its implementation with the virtual server management. Can include the fault management of the various devices.
- VM Management: Life cycle management of the Virtual Machines instanciated on a given host. Provides essentially methods to boot VMs, either from local disk, CDROM or network (e.g. through PXE).
- Volume Management: Provide a logical volume manager, as well as various storage related functions.
- Resource Management: Allocations of physical resources to many VMs hosted on a given server. Includes the scheduler configuration.
- Monitoring: Monitoring of resources used by various VMs. Could be an aggregation point for information collected in the various guest OS.
- Migration: Live migration of VMs from a server to a given target server. Could be more or less stateful or real time dependending on the virtualization layer capabilities.
OS Management
Mainly targeting the management of the guest OSes, and therefore not specific to the virtualization domain, but critical to have a end to end solution. Could be implemented by solutions like IBM Director, N1 System Manager, or HP Insight Manager but this would lead into additional complexities introduced by the management of virtual machines.
- OS Provisioning: Infrastructure required to implement NAS boot or SAN Boot, as well as building OS profiles
- OS Monitoring: Monitors OS parameters such as CPU utilization, directly from the guest OSes.
- OS Patching: Update of OSes with patches. Additional complexity when required to update non deployed VMs.
Datacenter Management
- Datacenter Resource Management : Grouping of server, storage and network resources and allocation to various services. Basis of multi-tenant aware solutions, or hierarchical resource management capabilities. Can implement some level of workload management.
- Failover : migration of virtual machines based on availability related policies.
- Configuration management : repository of various information about virtual machine parameters, or OS configurations. Could be also a repository for OS profiles, OS versions, ...
- Policy Management : More generic policies driving the operations like migration, or provisioning. Can be linked to performance goals, cost/utilization goals, schedules (calendar events)
- Automation : Definition of workflow on top of basic operations allowing the implementation of complex operations.
Next step is to try to map the various vendors to this breakdown.
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