Internet Engineering Task Force V. Grado
Internet-Draft T. Tsou
Intended status: Informational Huawei Technologies (USA)
Expires: December 14, 2011 N. So
Verizon Communications Inc.
June 12, 2011
Virtual Resource Operations and Management in the Data Center
draft-tsou-vrom-problem-statement-01
Abstract
The dynamic allocation of computing resources on a massive scale
through the use of virtual machines running over a "hypervisor" layer
to serve a large number of customers and applications simultaneously
brings a number of benefits but also a number of challenges to data
center operations. Such challenges range from acquiring the
information needed to provision the physical servers, storage and
networking elements, through accounting for resource and application
usage at the user level. The Distributed Management Task Force
(DMTF) has begun the work of developing the standards needed to
support this work, but many tasks remain. This document provides a
brief survey of the problem space, but focusses on the requirements
for operation and management of network resources within the data
center complex and between that complex and the users.
Status of this Memo
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This Internet-Draft will expire on December 14, 2011.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2011 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.1. Requirements Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Operational Challenges for Virtualization . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.1. A More Detailed Look At the Hypervisor . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.2. Operations and Management in a Virtualized Data Center . . 4
3. Real and Virtual Network Management in the Virtualized
Data Center . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
5. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
6. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
7. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
8. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
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1. Introduction
There is currently a strong movement toward virtualization of data
center resources, with the aim of improving physical resource
utilization, reducing energy consumption as a result, and improving
responsiveness to demands for data center resources. Along with this
is a parallel movement toward outsourcing data center operations,
with the result that multiple enterprises may share the same physical
resources for their own computing and storage requirements. Both in-
house and outsourced data center virtualization raise obvious
concerns over data security and regulatory compliance, but this is
just one aspect of the operational and management challenges raised
by large-scale resource virtualization.
The basic unit of resource virtualization in this architecture is the
virtual machine (VM), running over a "hypervisor" layer and sharing a
physical server with other virtual machines and a management entity.
The virtual machine has its own guest operating system, set of one or
more applications, and allocations of processing, storage, and
networking resources. The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF)
has provided a standard interface for management of the virtual
machine life cycle, the Open Virtualization Format [OVF].
Within the data center complex, virtual machines may migrate from one
set of physical resources to another. The data center complex may
itself be distributed geographically, and resources for a single
virtual machine may be spread over multiple locations. This raises
the importance of ensuring adequate and well-running network
resources within the data center complex.
The next section is a slightly more detailed description of the
interaction between the hypervisor and the virtual machines it
supports, followed by a general enumeration of the complete range of
operations and management issues associated with massive
virtualization within the data center complex. The following section
looks in more detail at the problem of operating and managing the
virtual and physical networking resources within the complex, with
the aim of laying the groundwork for identifying gaps in the existing
set of standards in this area. The concluding section actually
identifies those gaps.
1.1. Requirements Language
This document contains no normative language.
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2. Operational Challenges for Virtualization
2.1. A More Detailed Look At the Hypervisor
With virtualized resources, a virtual machine (VM) embodies virtual
hardware that is emulated by a hypervisor (or a similar mechanism
with respect to virtual networking resources. The hypervisor
mediates all interactions with the underlying physical hardware.
That mechanism is transparent to the guest operating system, which
runs completely independently of other VMs sharing the same physical
resources.
The hypervisor performs the mapping between the virtual resources of
the VM (usually an application and a guest operating system) and the
physical hardware of a server, storage, or network. The hypervisor
is the component responsible for managing physical resources to
allocate them fairly to the multiple VMs running on a host.
The main physical resource pools that the hypervisor needs to manage
to carry out its job are as follows:
o CPU: A configurable amount of CPU assigned to a VM, during
creation, regardless of the real amount of physical CPU. The
hypervisor uses a CPU scheduler to process the CPU requests from
the VMs.
o Disk: A single large file allocated on one the host's datastores
as a virtual disk for each VM. Disk I/O requests are also queued
for each VM.
o Memory: A fixed amount of memory that gets mapped into virtual
memory pages and in turn to physical memory pages. The hypervisor
must ensure there is no overallocation of virtual memory that the
physical memory cannot handle.
o Network: The virtual machine includes a virtual network to provide
the same functionality as a physical network, including IP
address, virtual NIC, switches and firewalls. Some network
traffic passes only between VMs on the same host, and will not be
visible to external physical tools.
2.2. Operations and Management in a Virtualized Data Center
[PTT] We can add material to expand this, but bear in mind that it is
just an introductory section and need not get too detailed.
From the brief description given above, one can infer a number of
operational challenges that arise in a virtualized environment to
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cover different levels of service in a data center. Some of
challenges are:
1. Impact of new devices and elements:
* monitoring of the VM life cycle, including VM migration ("lift
and shift");
* address management for VM life cycle support;
* resource monitoring for faults and abnormal conditions;
* metering of resource availability, performance metrics and
usage;
* monitoring of the status of the hypervisor and the interface
to it.
2. Infrastructure management support:
* connectivity needs for virtualization management;
* policy management and enforcement;
* virtualization performance management;
* interoperability of multiple hypervisors;
* open programmatic interfaces to support access and management
of data center contents and resources
3. Enabling service management:
* supporting secure low-latency VLAN and VPN connections in
large scale on an on-demand (pay as you go) basis for capacity
management of dedicated pools of resources
* scalable service hosting, collocation, and distributed
virtualized redundancy
* facilities management including premises, security, privacy,
and data integrity management for regulatory compliance;
* management of virtual private data centers, VPN-based data
centers.
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3. Real and Virtual Network Management in the Virtualized Data Center
[PTT] Time is pressing, so I'll propose text for this later, unless
someone else can do it. Basically we have to monitor at three
levels: virtual network connections (rely on the hypervisor for
that), physical connections within the (possibly distributed) data
center, and the customer connections into the data center.
4. Conclusions
[PTT] Juergen?? You'd know what tools exist now for the job and what
needs development.
5. Acknowledgements
Tom Taylor added text and may become an author unless it is necessary
to leave room for others.
6. IANA Considerations
This memo includes no request to IANA.
7. Security Considerations
Security is a very important consideration, both for private and
multi-user virtualized data centers. However, detailed discussion of
that topic is out of the scope of this document. This memo raises no
security issues in itself.
8. Informative References
[OVF] Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), "Open Virtualization
Format (OVF)", January 2010, <http://dmtf.org/standards/ovf>.
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Authors' Addresses
Victor M. Grado
Huawei Technologies (USA)
2330 Central Expwy,
Santa Clara,, CA 95050
USA
Phone:
Email: vgrado@huawei.com
Tina Tsou
Huawei Technologies (USA)
2330 Central Expwy,
Santa Clara,, CA 95050
USA
Phone:
Email: tena@huawei.com
Ning So
Verizon Communications Inc.
2400 N. Glenville Ave,
Richardson,, TX 75080
USA
Phone:
Email: ning.so@verizonbusiness.com
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