Novell ZENworks Orchestrator
Orchestrate your Data Center
Who directs all your management tools? Virtualization, high-performance computing and other advanced technologies promise to transform the data center. But how do you get these technologies working together for maximum value? And how do you automate the provisioning of resources to meet constantly changing needs? Novell has a solution. It's called Novell® ZENworks® Orchestrator.
"Virtualization in and of itself is interesting, and it gives you server efficiency, but without some of the automated tools, it may actually increase your management burden."
John Enck
Gartner
The Vision: Enterprise-class Management Capabilities for Commodity Scale-out Data Center Architectures
Automating the data center for maximum resource utilization and flexibility has always been the goal for forward-thinking IT administrators. But as centralized mainframe environments have been replaced by heterogeneous hardware, operating systems, storage and other resources, the vision of a tidy, efficient, automated data center has dimmed.
With techniques such as virtualized computing, shared storage and distributed resource management, administrators can simplify administration, maximize utilization, and assign resources dynamically to meet shifting workloads. But the means to commoditize these technologies and tie them together in an automated management framework was lacking—until now. Now a single automated solution can manage virtual machines, identities, storage and systems in an coordinated and intelligent way according to workload requirements, hardware health and business policies. New innovations in virtualization, systems management standards and Novell technology are converging to make the vision a reality. We call the result Orchestration.
On the Virtualization Front
Most virtualization in the data center today focuses on creating a "sandbox" for application development, testing and deployment. Some companies are beginning to take virtualization a step further by repurposing machines to handle different workloads and consolidating hardware resources. But to turn virtualization into a powerful, flexible platform for Orchestration, the industry will need to create tools for tying management of physical and virtual machines together. New, open virtualization formats from VMware and Microsoft will make it easier to migrate workloads across virtual machines, including Xen, with minimal modification.
Novell technology makes it possible to repurpose virtual machines and migrate workloads on the fly, as well as in an integrated management model for both physical and virtual machines. The objective is to create an agile, policy-based Orchestration environment—an environment that automates and orchestrates management of identities, systems, storage and virtual machines.
On the Standards Front
In order to maximize interoperability in the data center, you need to have products that use open standards. Novell support of the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) and Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is helping to tip the scales in favor of standards-based data center solutions. The DMTF has created a schema that defines all of the elements of a compute node within the Common Information Model (CIM) specification. On top of that, they have created the SMASH protocol and DMTF management profiles for enabling server management across hardware from multiple vendors. With that foundation in place DMTF formed the System Virtualization, Partitioning, and Clustering Working Group, which provides the basis for managing disparate virtualization technologies by defining standard interfaces or APIs for managing and monitoring virtual machines and the manager itself.
SNIA has created the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S), which documents a secure and reliable interface for management across multiple network storage platforms. Together, these specifications will provide a standard way to access these objects and to declare the image format—essentially commoditizing all the elements of a virtualized environment so they can be tied together to enable orchestrated management.
On the Novell Front
Novell has worked closely with DMTF, SNIA and open source communities to modularize, standardize, commoditize and virtualize the IT environment. The Novell data center automation solution implements a grid-inspired, usage-oriented computing model that manages compute and storage servers on behalf of applications or services hosted in virtual machines. A key component of the Novell solution is the Configuration Management Database (CMDB), which incorporates the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) process framework and provides a central repository for resource data. The CMDB offers a global view of IT assets and the state and relationship between IT resources.
Novell ZENworks Orchestrator
The "brain" of the data center automation system is Novell ZENworks Orchestrator. This is the key component that interacts with configuration and storage resource management servers to manage physical compute and storage resources and the relationships between them. The Orchestrator also manages virtual resources, controlling the entire lifecycle of each virtual machine. The Orchestrator is a third-generation orchestration engine that is built from the ground up to meet the requirements of on-demand computing. It combines the following capabilities:
- Resource management
- Job management
- Dynamic provisioning
- Policy management
- Accounting and auditing
- Real-time availability
In general, competitive products feature a global job scheduler and workload manager to orchestrate "jobs" across a distributed environment. But to legitimately orchestrate the operations of today's complex, sophisticated data centers, Novell believes it is necessary to have competencies in the six areas listed above.
Conclusion
With SUSE® Linux Enterprise 10, including the Xen virtual machine monitor, Novell is already leading the way in virtualization capabilities for the data center. Novell will also be constantly adding to the solution by building Management Packs with clearly defined policies and connectors for MS Virtualization, VMware and Xen. These Management Packs will complement future releases of SUSE Linux Enterprise and other operating systems.
Novell is working to achieve the ultimate goal of Orchestration within the data center. According to the Novell vision, Orchestration will have arrived when physical boundaries no longer apply: resources are automatically assigned to workloads according to dynamically changing needs; physical failures are unnoticeable to end users; and identity management, storage management, system management and virtual machine management are all tied together and automated across the IT environment.
Mainframe-like performance, reliability and manageability in today's heterogeneous, scalable, commodity server environment is the vision, and Novell is making it a reality. Watch for more developments from Novell in the future, capitalizing on virtualization and related technologies to orchestrate and automate the data center.
Recommended Reading
For more information see: http://www.novell.com/connectionmagazine/2006/q4/tech_talk_9.html