Hi,

As a member of the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), Novell has been participating in a working group that has defined an open standard for Virtualization Management. Details were given in a DMTF press release today, and a companion whitepaper.

"Novell strongly believes that open standards are essential for promoting, as well as easing the adoption of virtualization," said Eric Anderson, vice president of engineering for Systems and Resource Management at Novell. "We are committed to building these open standards into our virtualization management products and our contribution to the SVPC working group has resulted in a model that supports a centralized definition of virtual machines and remote deployment for lifecycle management. In a virtualized environment, the DMTF system virtualization standard delivers a complete view of the resources that need to be managed and is a crucial foundation of the service-oriented, next generation data center."

Novell and other industry partners helped create an open source implementation of the the System Virtualization standard for Linux, and Novell ships this implementation with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. Novell's ZENworks VM Builder, VM Warehouse and VM Orchestrator products are designed to manage Virtualization technologies that support the same standard. ZENworks VM Builder is a DMTF Common Information Model (CIM) based service that provides automation for building VMs to a specification derived from the System Virtualization standard, and ZENworks VM Warehouse is a CIM based service that provides version control for both Virtual Machine configuration settings and operating system image files. ZENworks Orchestrator deploys VMs to production servers based on a declarative specification of VM requirements encoded also in CIM format, that allows deterministic matching of service-level (VM) requirements with available infrastructure capabilities - Orchestrator deploys VMs to capable hardware based on a variety of extensible constraints such as CPU type, memory, network or storage accessibility, or even availability considerations such as clustered servers required for production versus single servers used for testing or maintenance.

The following screenshot is of the ZENworks Orchestrator console showing details for a Virtual Machine named ApacheVM. The VM Files dialog is open and lists the collection of CIM encoded Resource Allocation Setting Data (RASD) files for the VM, including for example, rasdmof_proc1, which is the RASD that defines this Virtual Machine's processor requirement.



We will be sharing more details of Novell's Open Source Standards based Management approaches for Virtual Machine, Server, Cluster and Storage infrastructure at the upcoming Management Developers Conference. Please let us know by replying to this blog, if this is a topic you would like to read more about as these standards evolve.

Cheers,
Robert