Enabling dynamic data centers with a smart bare-metal server platform

Abstract

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® Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI)-compliant BIOS, the Intel® Rapid Boot Toolkit (IRBT), allowing a resource manager to discover a new server during pre-boot, possibly in a baremetal state, and then perform an asset inventory, configure