Simulation of Active Blade Servers in an Enterprise

K.J. Poornaselvan, S. Shanmugasundaram, and C.D. Preya (Botswana)

Keywords

Servers, Server Blades, Simulator, Data Center Management, Linux OS, Rack Mount Server, Look Up protocols

Abstract

Server Blades are predominantly used in the IT infrastructure today owing to ease of management, energy efficiency and density. Data centers are made up of a huge number of blades and are treated as a resource to be mapped to run a specific application or a service. The blade servers are to be monitored continuously for the change in states to take appropriate action. This paper explains the simulation of a “server blade” and its characteristics in terms of memory, number of processors, number of network interfaces and number of storage interfaces. Simulator will also integrate with the Boot name server which helps plumbing the server blade to the boot device. The project will provide user interfaces to create, maintain and destroy the blades of appropriate characteristics dynamically. The interfaces provide ability to power on, power off, boot, get current state and induce failure modes in the blade. The simulated blade also exports interface for external clients to set states such as booting, shutting down etc., in a local register for states. The interface will be used by the system software service to mention the blade usage precisely. The technique also develops a verification module to test the behavior of the simulated server blade in the areas of state transition, programmability and failure characteristics. The benefit of this project is to enable simulating an IT infrastructure with a large number of server blades with different characteristics.

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