Internet Engineering Task Force V. Grado Internet-Draft T. Tsou Intended status: Informational Huawei Technologies (USA) Expires: December 14, 2011 N. So Verizon Communications Inc. June 12, 2011 Virtual Resource Operations and Management in the Data Center draft-tsou-vrom-problem-statement-01 Abstract The dynamic allocation of computing resources on a massive scale through the use of virtual machines running over a "hypervisor" layer 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. The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) has begun the work of developing the standards needed to support this work, but many tasks remain. This document provides a brief survey of the problem space, but focusses on the requirements for operation and management of network resources within the data center complex and between that complex and the users. 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 14, 2011. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2011 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. Grado, et al. Expires December 14, 2011 [Page 1] Internet-Draft Virtual Resource Ops & Management June 2011 This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License. Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.1. Requirements Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2. Operational Challenges for Virtualization . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.1. A More Detailed Look At the Hypervisor . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.2. Operations and Management in a Virtualized Data Center . . 4 3. Real and Virtual Network Management in the Virtualized Data Center . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 4. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 5. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 6. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 7. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 8. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Grado, et al. Expires December 14, 2011 [Page 2] Internet-Draft Virtual Resource Ops & Management June 2011 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. The 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 Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) has provided a standard interface for management of the virtual machine life cycle, the Open Virtualization Format [OVF]. Within the data center complex, virtual machines may migrate from one set of physical resources to another. The data center complex may itself be distributed geographically, and resources for a single virtual machine may be spread over multiple locations. This raises the importance of ensuring adequate and well-running network resources within the data center complex. The next section is a slightly more detailed description of the interaction between the hypervisor and the virtual machines it supports, followed by a general enumeration of the complete range of operations and management issues associated with massive virtualization within the data center complex. The following section looks in more detail at the problem of operating and managing the virtual and physical networking resources within the complex, with the aim of laying the groundwork for identifying gaps in the existing set of standards in this area. The concluding section actually identifies those gaps. 1.1. Requirements Language This document contains no normative language. Grado, et al. Expires December 14, 2011 [Page 3] Internet-Draft Virtual Resource Ops & Management June 2011 2. Operational Challenges for Virtualization 2.1. A More Detailed Look At the Hypervisor With virtualized resources, a virtual machine (VM) embodies virtual hardware that is emulated by a hypervisor (or a similar mechanism with respect to virtual networking resources. The hypervisor mediates all interactions with the underlying physical hardware. That mechanism is transparent to the guest operating system, which runs completely independently of other VMs sharing the same physical resources. The hypervisor 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 to carry out its job are as follows: o CPU: A configurable amount of CPU assigned to a VM, during creation, regardless of the real amount of physical CPU. The hypervisor uses a CPU scheduler 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: The virtual machine includes a virtual network to provide the same functionality as a physical network, including IP address, virtual NIC, switches and firewalls. Some network traffic passes only between VMs on the same host, and will not be visible to external physical tools. 2.2. Operations and Management in a Virtualized Data Center [PTT] We can add material to expand this, but bear in mind that it is just an introductory section and need not get too detailed. From the brief description given above, one can infer a number of operational challenges that arise in a virtualized environment to Grado, et al. Expires December 14, 2011 [Page 4] Internet-Draft Virtual Resource Ops & Management June 2011 cover different levels of service in a data center. Some of challenges are: 1. Impact of new devices and elements: * monitoring of the VM life cycle, including VM migration ("lift and shift"); * address management for VM life cycle support; * resource monitoring for faults and abnormal conditions; * metering of resource availability, performance metrics and usage; * monitoring of the status of the hypervisor and the interface to it. 2. Infrastructure management support: * connectivity needs for virtualization management; * policy management and enforcement; * virtualization performance management; * interoperability of multiple hypervisors; * open programmatic interfaces to support access and management of data center contents and resources 3. Enabling service management: * supporting secure low-latency VLAN and VPN connections in large scale on an on-demand (pay as you go) basis for capacity management of dedicated pools of resources * scalable service hosting, collocation, and distributed virtualized redundancy * facilities management including premises, security, privacy, and data integrity management for regulatory compliance; * management of virtual private data centers, VPN-based data centers. Grado, et al. Expires December 14, 2011 [Page 5] Internet-Draft Virtual Resource Ops & Management June 2011 3. Real and Virtual Network Management in the Virtualized Data Center [PTT] Time is pressing, so I'll propose text for this later, unless someone else can do it. Basically we have to monitor at three levels: virtual network connections (rely on the hypervisor for that), physical connections within the (possibly distributed) data center, and the customer connections into the data center. 4. Conclusions [PTT] Juergen?? You'd know what tools exist now for the job and what needs development. 5. Acknowledgements Tom Taylor added text and may become an author unless it is necessary to leave room for others. 6. IANA Considerations This memo includes no request to IANA. 7. Security Considerations Security is a very important consideration, both for private and multi-user virtualized data centers. However, detailed discussion of that topic is out of the scope of this document. This memo raises no security issues in itself. 8. Informative References [OVF] Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), "Open Virtualization Format (OVF)", January 2010, . Grado, et al. Expires December 14, 2011 [Page 6] Internet-Draft Virtual Resource Ops & Management June 2011 Authors' Addresses Victor M. Grado Huawei Technologies (USA) 2330 Central Expwy, Santa Clara,, CA 95050 USA Phone: Email: vgrado@huawei.com Tina Tsou Huawei Technologies (USA) 2330 Central Expwy, Santa Clara,, CA 95050 USA Phone: Email: tena@huawei.com Ning So Verizon Communications Inc. 2400 N. Glenville Ave, Richardson,, TX 75080 USA Phone: Email: ning.so@verizonbusiness.com Grado, et al. Expires December 14, 2011 [Page 7]