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2.1 Managing a Utility Computing Hosting Center with Moab
Moab enables true utility computing by allowing compute resources to be reserved, allocated, and dynamically provisioned to meet the needs of internal or external workload. Moab is able to respond to either manual or automatically generated requests and can guarantee resource availability subject to existing service level agreement (SLA) or quality of service (QoS) based arrangements.
With Moab's hosting center capabilities, an organization can dynamically control network, compute, application, and storage resources and can dynamically provision operating systems, security, credentials, and other aspects of a complete end-to-end compute environment.
- 2.1.1 Architecting a New Utility Computing Hosting Center
- 2.1.2 Initial Configuration for Utility Computing Hosting Centers
- 2.1.3 Advanced Configuration for Utility Computing Hosting Centers
Hosting Center Resources
In most cases, the end goal of a hosting center is to make available to a customer a complete, secure, packaged environment that allows them to accomplish one or more specific tasks. This packaged environment is called a virtual cluster and may consist of the compute, network, data, software, and other resources required by the customer. For successful operation, these resources must be brought together and provisioned, or configured, to provide a seamless environment that allows customers to quickly and easily accomplish their desired tasks.
Hosting Center Customer Interface
The desired operational model for many environments is providing the customer with a fully automated self-service web interface. Once a customer has registered with the host company, access to a hosting center portal is enabled. Through this interface, customers describe their workload requirements, time constraints, and other key pieces of information. The interface communicates with the back-end services to determine when, where, and how the needed virtual cluster can be created and reports back a number of options to the user. The user selects the desired option and can monitor the status of that virtual cluster via web and email updates. When the virtual cluster is ready, web and email notification is provided including access information. The customer logs in and begins working.
Hosting Center Policies/Service Level Agreement
Enabling access in a first come first served model provides real benefits, but in many cases customers require reliable resource access with guaranteed responsiveness. These requirements may be any performance, resource, or time based rule such as in the following examples:
- I need my virtual cluster within 24 hours of asking.
- I want a virtual cluster available from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
- I want to always have a virtual cluster available and automatically grow/shrink it based on current load.
Quality of service or service level agreement policies allow customers to convert the virtual cluster resources to a strategic part of their business operations, greatly increasing the value of these resources. (See activating standby resources.)
Hosting Center Administration
Behind the scenes, a hosting center consists of resource managers, reservations, triggers, and policies. Once configured, administration of such a system involves addressing reported resource failures (such as disk failures and network outages) and monitoring delivered performance to determine if customer satisfaction requires tuning policies or adding resources.
See Also
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