Manageability is a key requirement for a broad spectrum of information technology (IT) systems ranging from laptops to blade servers to clusters to large scale data centers. With rising complexity and scale in tomorrow's, enterprise IT, systems, the management of these systems has become a dominating cost. Several independent studies found that 60-70% of IT costs today are spent on maintenance costs. A key challenge in the design of future manageability architectures is the organization and propagation of management information related to the IT infrastructure in data centers.
The Common Information Model or CIM is a standards-based approach to provide a common definition of management information for systems, networks, applications and services, and allows for vendor extensions. It is emerging to be a key component in manageability architectures and provides for standardization, an object oriented model, and deployment through web-based protocols. CIM's common definitions enable vendors to exchange semantically rich management information between systems throughout the network. CIM is composed of a specification and a schema. The schema provides the actual model descriptions, while the specification defines the details for integration with other management models. Typically, in a CIM-based infrastructure, management applications (clients) connect to a CIMOM (CIM object manager) resident on managed nodes. The CIMOM in turn invokes CIM providers that provide the requested management information to the caller.
While CIM-based systems have been extremely popular, the emerging trends towards virtualization, consolidation, and hardware enhancements presents challenges for effective management with such systems.
In current state of the art in CIM-based inventory management, per-server CIMOMs keep up-to-date information of assets at the local end-points, and periodically provide it to data center level tools that aggregate the assets across the servers and blades. With the exponential growth of the amount of inventory information relating to the software and hardware per server in modern data centers, the collection of such inventory information typically takes place through multiple CIMOM end-points, as shown in FIG. 10.
FIG. 13 shows a conventional CIM-based inventory management system. A management application 1301 external to the managed node collects inventory information from CIMOMs 1302, 1303, 1304 and 1305. For example, the hardware inventory information is provided through the CIMOM 1305 typically hosted in firmware at the management processor, shown as iLO. The management processor may communicate with processors/cores in the hardware to receive information, for monitoring the processors and managing the processors. The management processor may communicate with the managed processors using an implementation of the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) specification, which defines a set of common interfaces for hardware and firmware which system administrators can use to monitor system health and manage the system.
Inventory information related to the hypervisor, i.e., the virtualization layer, is provided through the CIMOM 1302 in the control domain, e.g., Dom0 for the Xen Hypervisor. The CIMOMs 1303 and 1304 in each guest virtual machine (VM) provide software and application inventory information.
It is beneficial to correlate the information from the multiple CIMOMs to provide a single view of the hardware, software, and virtualization layers. For example, decisions to upgrade hardware (e.g., memory) benefit from knowing what applications are being hosted on the server. Hardware fault diagnostics decisions would benefit from knowing what applications are being affected, and knowledge of the physical platforms on which the hypervisors and VMs reside would aid in better license tracking. Correlating the hypervisor inventory information with those for the set of VMs hosted on it would aid in better statistics gathering, and correlating the per-VM inventory information with that on the hypervisor would help in better accountability and licensing.
Existing management systems, such as the system shown in FIG. 13, are operable to receive the inventory information from the CIMOMs at the hardware, software, and virtualization layers, however, the information is not correlated. Furthermore, it is difficult to correlate hardware, software, and virtualization inventory information, especially when there are thousands of CIMOMs, such as for a large data center, because the received information lacks common parameters for joining or correlation at a centralized entity in the network. In addition, having multiple non-coordinated CIMOMs leads to increased administrator workload, which leads to higher overall cost in the data center. For example, an administrator would have to be aware of the various CIMOMs at each server, their type, IP address, and other installation information to correlate all the data from the CIMOMs. When multiplied by the tens of thousands of machines in a data center, this leads to high administrator costs. If an automated software were to perform the same task, it would translate to higher complexity for the management software itself.