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Differences from draft-tsou-vrom-problem-statement-01.txt
Internet Engineering Task Force V. Grado
Internet-Draft T. Tsou
Intended status: Informational Huawei Technologies
Expires: December 15, 2011 N. So
Verizon Communications Inc.
June 13, 2011
Virtual Resource Operations & Management in the Data Center
draft-tsou-vrom-problem-statement-02
Abstract
TThe dynamic allocation of computing resources on a massive scale
through the use of virtual machines 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. In
particular, this document describes the problem of operational and
management challenges that virtualization brings in the (carrier)
data center as an enabler of new technologies such as self-
provisioning and elastic capacity and related benefits of
consolidation, reduced total cost of ownership, and energy
management. This document does not cover the problem of address
resolution in massive data centers. It does not cover technologies
related to VDI either.
Status of this Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-
Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on December 15, 2011.
Copyright Notice
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Copyright (c) 2011 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
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described in the Simplified BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Operational Challenges for Virtualization . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.1. Unique Requirements from Virtualization . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.2. Operations and Management in a Virtualized DC . . . . . . . 5
4. VM Performance and Configuration Management Challenges . . . . 6
4.1. Performance Management Challenges in Virtualization . . . . 6
4.2. VM Configuration and Inventory Operational Challenges . . . 6
5. Operational Challenges in Services with Virtual Resources . . . 6
5.1. VM Migration Operational Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5.2. VPC Operational and Management Challenges . . . . . . . . . 7
6. Conclusion and Recommendation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
7. Manageability Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
8. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
9. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
10. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
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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.
IThe 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 need to mix and
match products from different vendors can lead to interoperability
challenges that need to be addressed by standards from the start, or
risk vendor lock-in.
This document focuses on the problem statement of various data center
virtual resources operations and management areas. This document
does not cover the problem of address resolution in massive data
centers nor the problem of technologies known as VDI.
2. Terminology
CE: Customer Edge
DC: Data Center
DE: Data Center Edge
PE: Provider Edge
VDC: Virtualized Data Center
VDI: Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure
VPC: Virtual Private Clouds (or VPN based Clouds)
VM: Virtual Machine (or host)
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SLA: Service Level Agreement
3. Operational Challenges for Virtualization
3.1. Unique Requirements from Virtualization
There are operational challenges and requirements ensuing from
virtualized resources that are unique and not present in conventional
implementations.
In virtualized resources, a virtual machine (VM) embodies virtual
hardware that is emulated by a hypervisor (or a similar mechanism in
virtual networking resources), that mediates all interactions with
the underlying physical hardware. That mechanism is transparent to
the guest operating system, running completely independent of other
guests VM in the same physical resources.
The hypervisor then 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
for carrying out its job are as follows:
o CPU: An configurable amount of CPU assigned to a VM, during
creation, regardless of the real amount of physical CPU. A CPU
scheduler is used by the hypervisor 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: It includes a virtual network to provide the same
functionality as a physical network, including IP address, virtual
NIC, switches and firewalls. Because the network traffic is only
handled between VMs, many times there is no visibility to external
physical tools.
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3.2. Operations and Management in a Virtualized DC
From the above, a number of operational challenges arise in a
virtualized environment that cover different leves of service in a
DC. Some of challenges are:
1. New devices and elements
* Monitor VM lifecycle, including VM migration ("lift & shift")
* Address management for VM lifecycle support
* Resource monitoring for faults and abnormal conditions
* Resource availability, peformance metrics and usage based
metering
* Hypervisor status and interface monitoring
2. Infrastructure management support
* Connectivity needs for virtualization management
* Policy management and enforcement in the Virtualized DC
* IPFIX for virtualization performance management
* Interoperability of multiple hypervisors
* Open programmatic interfaces to support access and management
of Datacenter contents and resources
3. Service management enablement
* Supporting secure low-latency VLAN and VPN connections in
large scale on on-demand (pay as you go) basis for capacity
management of dedicated pool of resources
* Service hosting, co-location, and distributed virtualized
redundancy for seamless scaling
* Facilities management including premises, security, privacy
and data integrity management for regulatory compliancy
* Management of VPN-based clouds
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4. VM Performance and Configuration Management Challenges
4.1. Performance Management Challenges in Virtualization
From the discussion in the previous sections, it is clear that
performance management for virtualized resources is a very critical
area. This can include capacity management, as well as availability
management, since they provide a status of the health of the network
resources and services, including the health of the VMs and
hypervisors.
While a hypervisor is in charge of load balancing and keeping tab of
resource utilization, additional mechanisms need to be in place to
obtain the best performance. There is a need to obtain key metrics
from the VMs that can be used to support a more robust management of
resources and services.
A protocol such as IPFIX that can tap into VMs to obtain flow metrics
needs to be devised (or existing ones enhanced). The source of the
metrics for virtualized resources are diferent from the sources in
physical resources, as described above.
Metrics such as uptime that are provided by mechanisms within IPPM
and PMOL recommendations need to be obtained for virtualized hosts as
well.
4.2. VM Configuration and Inventory Operational Challenges
Another critical challenge arising from the creation of virtual hosts
is 'sprawl' that can happen over time when there is lack of control
and monitoring in the lifecycle of a large quantity of VMs. Besides
service and performance problems that might arise, configuration
management issues will ensue from VM that are consuming resources in
the background, if unmonitored, some may become out of sync with
policy and compliance, with fine-tuning applications, with bandwith
management, etc.
There is a need to carry out configuration management for virtual
resources and hosts that include discovery, inventory and backup, for
the both the virtual and physical resources. There is a need for a
protocol like NETCONF that also covers virtual hosts.
5. Operational Challenges in Services with Virtual Resources
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5.1. VM Migration Operational Challenges
VM migration, also called by other names such as VM Motion, "lift &
shift", etc., implies moving a VM to another location within a data
center, or even to a different data center, with the consequent
operational and management challenges.
Just to name a few of the challenges:
o Policy reconfiguration in the destination device
o Other dynamic information updating in destination
o Address management and reconfiguration when involving different
data centers
In addition, there are a few complex models for the interconnection
of service providers supporting virtualized resources already working
their way into real implementations that will allow more complex VM
migration schemes but that also represent their own set of
operational and management challenges.
5.2. VPC Operational and Management Challenges
From the virtualized resources deployment models, this model brings
together most of the operational requirements into the unified
computing stack, and in particular the network side, directly. VPC
embodies services that are delivered over a virtual private network
(VPN) and therefore the VPN protocols and implementations need to be
enhanced to support the "characteristics" mentioned above in addition
to their own operational requirements. At a higher level, a VPC
needs to meet SLA and enfore policies, meet demands from the
management of order requests, self-provisioning, usage-based
metering, and management, either through programmatic interfaces or
by other means.
There are two cases, 1) the pure play virtualization-enabled
provider, that needs to use another carrier to interconnect the
different data centers, and 2) the carrier offering over their own
network. In both of those cases, the VPN protocols need operational
enhancements to support end-to-end SLA monitoring or even just
internal service level objectives in addition to customer SLA, all
which requires corresponding metrics, based on usage per resource and
per customer.
In the second case, there are additional improvements that can be
made as in the case of the deployment of a DC Edge device (DE), a box
in between the DC and the network edge that will simplify
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provisioning and operations by eliminating the need of a CE-PE pair.
6. Conclusion and Recommendation
With the new networking, server and storage technologies converging
in to the DC in the form of unified computing solutions at whose core
is a virtualization stack, many new operational and management
challenges arise.
Therefore, we recommend that the IETF engage in the study of the
problem of virtualized resources operations and management and, if
appropriate, the development of interoperable solutions.
7. Manageability Considerations
This document does not add additional manageability considerations.
8. Security Considerations
To come.
9. IANA Considerations
This memo currently includes no request to IANA.
10. Acknowledgements
Awaiting comments.
Authors' Addresses
Victor M. Grado
Huawei Technologies
2330 Central Expwy
Santa Clara, CA 95050
US
Phone:
Email: vgrado@huawei.com
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Tina Tsou
Huawei Technologies
2330 Central Expwy
Santa Clara, CA 95050
US
Phone:
Email: tena@huawei.com
Ning So
Verizon Communications Inc.
2400 N. Glenville Ave
Richardson, TX 75080
US
Phone:
Email: ning.so@verizonbusiness.com
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