Appliance Boundary

This chapter explains in detail what is a CA 3Tera AppLogic appliance.

Overview / General

A CA 3Tera AppLogic virtual appliance (or simply, appliance, in the text below) is an instance of an OS installation or another self-contained executable entity that can run as an i386 (or x86_64) virtual machine and has the following characteristics:

The executable code is contained on one or more volume images, formatted either as a PC x86 bootable hard disk or as single disk partitions.
Configures itself (network, properties, etc) using the dhcp-based protocol described below.
Upon startup, reports success/failure to the CA 3Tera AppLogic grid, using a utility provided for this purpose by CA Technologies.
If used as part of a CA 3Tera AppLogic application, communicates with other appliances using peer-to-peer IPv4 connections - the CA 3Tera AppLogic equivalent of a direct link between two Ethernet ports.
All configurable settings of the appliance are in the form of properties - that is, named parameters, each one with a defined type chosen from the types supported by CA 3Tera AppLogic and optionally a defined range of valid values. The property types currently supported by CA 3Tera AppLogic are: string, integer, IP address.

Note: CA 3Tera AppLogic also supports a legacy appliance, which is not configured over the network and requires its volumes to be modified off line prior to start. This type of appliance is not covered by the present document).

This section contains the following topics:

Exterior Boundary

Interior Boundary