Enabling The Autonomic Data Center With A Smart Bare-Metal Server Platform

Ever increasing data center complexity poses a significant burden on IT administrators. This burden can become unbearable without the help of self-managed systems that monitor themselves and automatically modify their state in order to carry out business processes according to high level objectives set by service level agreements (SLA) and policies. Among the key IT management tasks that must be automated and enhanced to realize the idea of an autonomic and highly dynamic data center, are discovery, configuration, and provisioning of new servers. In this direction, this paper describes pre-boot capabilities endowing the bare metal server with the ability to be discovered, queried, configured, and provisioned at time zero using industry standards like Common Information Model (CIM), CIM-XML, and Service Location Protocol (SLP). The capabilities are implemented as a payload of an Intel (R) Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI)-compliant BIOS, the Intel (R) Rapid Boot Toolkit (IRBT), allowing a resource manager to discover a new server during pre-boot, possibly in a bare-metal state, and then perform an asset inventory, configure the server including CPU-specific settings, and provision it with the most appropriate image. All these tasks may be carried out based on decisions taken by the resource manager according to server capabilities, application requirements. SLAs. and high-level policies. Additionally, this system uses reliable protocols, thus minimizing error possibilities.