1.2 Software Architecture

ZENworks Orchestrator is built as an enterprise server with capabilities to support extremely large computing environments. It includes all the services required to provide an enhanced grid computing application server environment.

A simple view of the ZENworks Orchestrator software architecture is diagrammed below, showing the Orchestrator software components:

The ZENworks Orchestrator Server

The ZENworks Orchestrator Server is the gateway between enterprise applications and resource servers. The server has two primary functions:

In the first function, the server manages the computing resources by collecting, maintaining, and updating their status availability, service cost, and other facts. Changes to the computing resources can be made either by the administrator or by the computing resource owner if there is one. The individual who makes changes (administrator or owner) is not important in this first function. What is important is that changes are discovered and the computing resource attributes are kept up-to-date.

The second function of the server is to run application requests—called jobs—on the computing resources. Because the server is capable of handling multiple jobs, it uses a policy-based broker and scheduler to decide when and how a job should run on the managed computing resources. The decisions are based on many controlled factors, including the number of computing resources, their cost, and a variety of other factors as requested by the application, but managed under policy constraints set up by the server administrator.The server runs the job and provides all the job’s output responses back to the requesting application.The server handles and responds to the application with any error conditions, includes security, faults, outages, etc., that it might encounter. It provides failover capabilities to allow jobs to continue if computing resources and network conditions degrade.

The ZENworks Orchestrator Agent

The ZENworks Orchestrator Agent is installed on all computing resources that are to be managed. It runs applications under the management of the Orchestrator Server.

The ZENworks Orchestrator Clients

The ZENworks Orchestrator Clients let a computing resource administrator troubleshoot, initiate, change, or shut down server functions for ZENworks Orchestrator and its computing resources. The clients also monitor all managed computing resource job activity and provide facilities to manage application jobs. When you install the Clients on a computing resource, you are installing the following tools:

For more information about the clients, see Section 1.3, How Do I Interact with ZENworks Orchestrator?. For more information about the toolkit, see Using the Orchestrator Client SDK in the Novell ZENworks Orchestrator 1.2 Developer Guide and Reference.

The ZENworks Orchestrator Console

The ZENworks Orchestrator Console is a graphical user interface running on Java. It provides a way for the Orchestrator administrator to troubleshoot and to initiate, change, or shut down the functioning of the Orchestrator Server and its resources. It also functions as a monitor of all Orchestrator job activity, and it provides an interface for managing Orchestrator jobs. For more information about the Orchestrator Console, see Section 2.2, The ZENworks Orchestrator Console and Using the ZENworks Orchestrator Console in the Novell ZENworks Orchestrator 1.2 Administration Guide.

The ZENworks Orchestrator User Portal

The ZENworks Orchestrator User Portal is available as a thin client. It provides end users with the ability to administer their jobs among the managed computing resources. For more information about the User Portal, see Using the ZENworks Orchestrator User Portal in the Novell ZENworks Orchestrator 1.2 Job Management Guide.

Other ZENworks Orchestrator Components

As indicated in Section 1.1.1, What Is ZENworks Orchestrator?, ZENworks Virtual Machine Management (VM Management) can be licensed as an add-on Management Pack to the basic ZENworks Orchestrator components. For more information about VM Management software architecture, see the Novell ZENworks Orchestrator 1.2 Virtual Machine Management Guide.