BFC Glossary
Here are the term definitions of the Backbone Fabric Controller.
The difference between an attended and an unattended installation is in the user interaction required in the installation process.
An attended installation requires the user to attend and watch the installation and provide the necessary keyboard input.
A backbone network is a part of a computer network that interconnects various pieces of network,
providing a path for the exchange of information between different LANs or subnets. The backbone is
a private network for BFC all operations. When connected to a switch, the Spanning-tree option must be
disabled for the backbone. This is an Applogic requirement.
How to check for STP on the backbone network
The BMI ISO Tool is a utility included in the bfcinstall.iso file. It allows data center administrators to create an ISO image for a bare metal install of the CentOS and the BFC.The user can create one or more installation images with specific features either for an attended or unattended installation.
CentOS is a free operating system distribution based upon the Linux kernel. It is derived entirely from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution.
CentOS exists to provide a free enterprise class computing platform.CentOS stands for Community enterprise Operating System.
The discovery is an automatic process which installs the CentOS operating system on servers.
The servers must be PXE enabled and the installation starts when the server boots.
Two different discovery modes can be selected: Autodiscovery and manual discovery.
The Autodiscovery is dangerous: it pushes the CentOS operating system onto all servers found in the backbone network.
The manual discovery allows to add the MAC address of the PXE enabled servers to a list. Only servers on the list will be installed.
After the discovery all data on those machines is lost, because the hard drive is formatted.
The Discovery tab can be found in the BFC Administration menu from the left menu.
The external network is a public network that provides the IP range for grids when creating virtual machines.
IP ranges for Applications and hardware are necessary to create network virtualization.
A grid is a combination of different servers to provide a virtual environment for cloud computing.
Each and every grid runs its own copy of an operation system (CentOS) with virtual machines, virtual volumes, virtual networks and software.
For the virtualization VMware ESX or XEN is used.
The inventory is performed at server discovery. A utility image runs on the servers and transfers the information about network cards, IP adresses CPU cores, CPU speed memory and power types and hard drives to the BFC.
Before creating a grid, the user has to choose a virtualization platform, XEN or VMWare.
A main feature of the Backbone Fabric Controller is a mixed hypervisor support.
This means XEN and VMware ESX can run on the same grid in version 3.0 through 3.5. The mixed hypervisor support was deprecated in 3.7 and 3.8.
Installation that is performed without user interaction during its progress.
An unattended installation is an automated installation process. The user does not supply anything.
The input of IP addresses, password and other parameters comes from a project file.
In computer networking, virtual local area network, virtual LAN or VLAN is a concept of partitioning a physical network,
so that distinct subnets are created. This is usually configured on a switch.
VMware ESX 4.1 update 2 is one of the supported hypervisors in AppLogic 3.0-3.5. (ESX is not supported in 3.7 and later.) A maximun of 80 servers per grid is possible.
VMware ESX is an enterprise-level product for computer virtualization product offered by VMware, Inc.
Most Applogic customers choose VMware ESX instead of Xen.
Advantages:
Disadvantge:
Xen is a hypervisor providing services that allow multiple computer operating systems to execute on the same computer hardware concurrently.
The Xen community develops and maintains Xen as free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPLv2).
The Xen hypervisor is included in the BFC and installed automatically.
Advantages of Xen:
Disadvantages of Xen:
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