Method, system, and product for identifying provisioning operations via planning methods

Abstract

A method, system, and computer program product are disclosed for automatically determining a valid ordering of provisioning operations, and their needed parameters, so that a provisioning system can configure a desired resource state. This is accomplished by formally describing the pre-conditions and effects of provisioning operations, the current state of managed resources and the desired final state. A planning algorithm is then used to determine the provisioning operations, a valid ordering and appropriate parameters to bring the system from the current state to the desired state.

Description

BACKGROUND [0001] 1. Technical Field [0002] The present invention relates generally to resource provisioning systems, and in particular to a method, system, and product for automatically determining a valid ordering of provisioning operations implemented by such systems to reach a desired resource configuration state through the use of planning methods. [0003] 2. Description of the Related Art [0004] Resource provisioning systems, or provisioning systems, enable the configuration of a set of interconnected computing resources. Such resources, or managed resources, include, for example, servers, firewalls, and software. A provisioning system makes available a set of provisioning operations that will automate some configuration tasks performed on the set of managed resources. For example, a provisioning operation may assign a port on a network switch (often called a switch port) to a particular virtual local area network (VLAN). [0005] This configuration operation is one in a sequence...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0012] A method to automate provisioning based on a specification of a desired configuration state is not described in the prior art without mapping effects of the provisioning operations to single entities (objects and relationships) in the desired state. It is not described how to automate provisioning using an existing provisioning system that may not make available provisioning operations that obey this m...

Problems solved by technology

The order of provisioning operations in the provisioning workflow is important as the wrong order can lead to a situation where connectivity with managed resources is lost and the entire execution of the workflow fails to complete.

Therefore, the definition of a workflow to realize configuration activities is today a manual, slow and error prone process.

It is a key problem for users of provisioning systems to determine which provisioning operations should be invoked, in what order, and with what parameters in order to bring the system from the current state to its desired state.

Images