Keitaro Uehara

Proposal and Evaluation of Data-Model Translation for Server-Virtualization Environment to Improve Virtual-Network Configuration Management

To reduce the operational load of virtual-network operation in data centers that contain server virtualization platforms and network switches provided by multiple vendors, it would become the challenge to ease management of configurations which are different among server-virtualization environments. This paper proposes a new data-model translation method to unify data-model among multiple configurations of server-virtualization platforms. As the result of evaluation with 24 virtual machines, data-model translation overhead was less than 10% of the time to acquire virtual-machine configuration, and the network management system took 80.5 s to generate configuration information for the overall system. These results indicate that the proposed method is effective to improve the efficiency of configuration management of virtual networks.

Study on supporting technology for operational procedure design of IT systems in cloud-era datacenters

Datacenters are now widely used, and their sizes are increasing due to the rapid spread of cloud computing. Meanwhile, the cost of IT-system operations occupies 60% of the total cost in a datacenter. So far, improving operations has been focused on automating operations with operation management middleware. However, designing operational procedures, including composing and modifying operational manuals and checklists, is also a big issue since it is time consuming. Supporting technology that improves the efficiency of IT-system operational procedure design has been studied by focusing on the commonly used procedural parts. Existing checklists were analyzed to extract the iterated patterns of the procedures in order to evaluate the technology. The evaluation results showed that common operations such as the ones on management middleware and the remote log-in were extracted as procedural parts. The number of checklist composition steps was reduced by 45% on average and that of the modification steps was reduced by 87% on average by using these procedural parts. A prototyping tool was developed, and the checklists of a sample system different from the analyzed one were implemented on the tool.

Proposal of virtual network configuration acquisition function for data center operations and management system

Virtualization technologies have been widely deployed in data centers to improve the system utilization. However, they cause increased workload for operators to clarify the structure of virtual networks in data centers. To reduce the operation time, this paper provides the virtual-network management system which automates the integration of the configurations of the virtual networks. The proposed system collects the configurations from server virtualization platforms and VLAN-supported switches, and integrates these configurations according to the newly developed XML-based management information model for virtual-network configurations. The preliminary evaluations show that the proposed system helps to reduce the time to collect and update the configurations by about 40 percent. This result implies that the proposed system is effective for improving the configuration management process for virtual networks in data centers.