Richard E. Harper

A Case for High Availability in a Virtualized Environment (HAVEN)

The cost and operational complexity of traditional high availability solutions has limited their widespread adoption. Virtualization allows availability properties to be associated with the system architecture, rather than depending on the intrinsic reliability of components. This paper introduces an extensible grammar that classifies the states and transitions of virtual machine images. From this grammar, rules for recovery and High Availability can be created which define how virtualization allows for simplified fault tolerance, making HAVENs accessible to the mainstream user.

Using virtualization for high availability and disaster recovery

Traditional high-availability and disaster recovery solutions require proprietary hardware, complex configurations, applicationspecific logic, highly skilled personnel, and a rigorous and lengthy testing process. The resulting high costs have limited their adoption to environments with the most critical applications. However, high availability and disaster recovery are becoming increasingly important in many environments that cannot bear the complexity and the expense involved. In this paper, we show that virtualization can be used to develop solutions that meet this market demand. We describe the recently released Virtual Availability Manager (VAM) product offering, which provides simplified availability solutions using Xent-based virtualization, and which is available as part of the IBM Systems Director product. We present key design principles of VAM, explain its architecture and current capabilities, and describe the way it is being extended to enable recovery in case of disaster.

Technical forum—Management of application complexes in multitier clustered systems

In this Technical Forum article, we describe a generalized management framework for application complexes in multitiered cluster environments. The application complexes can be viewed as distinct autonomic computing entities that live together in thecluster. The management framework was implemented on a rack-mounted cluster of servers using the IBM Director management tool.

Experiences with Building Disaster Recovery for Enterprise-Class Clouds

The ability to recover from disasters is an important requirement for many enterprises. With enterprise-class workloads increasingly hosted on the cloud, cloud customers have come to expect disaster recovery (DR) as a necessary feature from cloud platforms. This paper identifies key challenges in providing DR as a service on enterprise cloud platforms, and portrays DR solutions for a managed cloud platform. In particular, we present the reference architecture for DR solutions, and describe our practical experiences in providing a portfolio of DR solutions for the cloud platform. The solutions cover diverse target recovery sites, such as an equivalent cloud site, a dedicated recovery site, and a customer-owned site. From the experiences, we provide insights into and lessons on implementing DR for enterprise-class clouds.

Acoustic Noise Cancellation by Phase Alignment of Cooling Fans

With increasing power consumption of computer systems, faster and larger cooling fans are used and acoustic noise management becomes difficult. In this paper, we show that by locking a pair of cooling fan motors into a common frequency and 180 degrees out of phase, the dominant tone most perceptible by human ear can be reduced.

DynaPlan: Resource placement for application-level clustering

Creating a reliable computing environment from an unreliable infrastructure is a common challenge. Application-Level High Availability (HA) clustering addresses this problem by relocating and restarting applications when failures are detected. Current methods of determining the relocation target(s) of an application are rudimentary in that they do not take into account the myriad factors that influence an optimal placement. This paper presents DynaPlan, a method that improves the quality of failover planning by allowing the expression of a wide and extensible range of considerations, such as multidimensional resource consumption and availability, architectural compatibility, security constraints, location constraints, and policy considerations, such as energy-favoring versus performance-favoring. DynaPlan has been implemented by extending the IBM PowerHA clustering solution running on a group of IBM System P servers. In this paper, we describe the design, implementation, and preliminary performance evaluation of DynaPlan.

A virtual resource placement service

Server, storage, and network virtualization and the growing adoption of cloud computing has expanded both the complexity and the value of intelligent allocation and management of data center resources. Resource allocation in a cloud environment is of fundamental importance. There are many competing goals, with differing priorities, that contribute to optimizing virtual resource allocation and placement including performance, reliability, security, energy, etc. We have developed an open extensible architecture to provide placement recommendations which allows for different independently developed Domain Managers to provide input/advice on placement. We have further developed the means to orchestrate the placement, ensuring that the required configuration actions be enacted both before and after the migration of the virtual machine. This paper explores the topic of providing a core placement calculation and orchestration architecture to facilitate management of workload demands in a cloud environment. We describe this architecture for placement services and orchestration, and present some results from a prototype implementation.

Disaster Recovery for Cloud-Hosted Enterprise Applications

We describe disaster protection and recovery of cloud-hosted enterprise applications both at the cloud infrastructure level and at the application level. We explore scenarios which favor one option over the other, and scenarios where a combination of both are required for effective and end-to-end protection. Through case studies grounded in the experience of implementing disaster recovery for IBMs Cloud Managed Services (CMS) platform, we highlight the complexities of protecting enterprise applications on the cloud. For recovery planning and execution, we present a scheduling algorithm that recovers machines hosted on cloud by taking into account application-level logical dependencies and the business criticalities of the applications.

Business Resiliency Framework for Enterprise Workloads in the Cloud.

Businesses with enterprise-level workloads such as Systems Applications and Products (SAP) workloads require business level resiliency including high availability, clustering, or physical server appliances. To enable businesses to use enterprise workloads in a cloud, the IBM Cloud Managed Services (CMS) cloud offers many SAP enterprise-level workloads for both virtualized and non-virtualized cloud environments. Based on our experience with enabling resiliency for enterprise-level workloads like SAP and Oracle, we realize that as the end-to-end process is quite cumbersome, complex and expensive. Therefore, it would be highly beneficial for the customers and the cloud providers to have a systematic business resiliency framework in place, which would very well fit the cloud model with appropriate level of abstraction, automation, while allowing the desired cost benefits. In this paper, we introduce an end-to-end business resiliency framework and resiliency life cycle. We further introduce an algorithm to determine the optimal resiliency pattern for enterprise applications using a diverse set of platforms in the IBM CMS cloud

Providing Resiliency to Orchestration and Automation Engines in Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid cloud environments have seen a rapid rise in recent years. An essential part of a hybrid cloud is its ability to orchestrate the allocation, provisioning, and management of different compute resources spanning multiple cloud systems, and drive these operations across multiple cloud systems in an automated way. The Orchestration and Automation Engines (OAEs) of a hybrid cloud must themselves be highly available for ensuring high resiliency of the hybrid cloud. We present our experience in providing resiliency to the OAEs of a real-world hybrid cloud in this paper. The presentation includes the resiliency architecture of the OAEs, solutions that deal with errors ranging from software component crash to configuration/metadata error and data corruption, experimental results and our lessons learned from the practical experience.