System and method for controlling cloud and virtualized data centers in an intelligent workload management system

Abstract

The system and method for controlling cloud and virtualized data centers described herein may include a computing environment having a model-driven, service-oriented architecture for creating collaborative threads to manage workloads, and further to creating cloud images having embedded management agents and identity services for validating the cloud images prior to deployment into the cloud and virtualized data centers and controlling, monitoring, and auditing activity associated with the cloud images following deployment into the cloud and virtualized data centers.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]This application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Patent Application Ser. No. 61 / 264,562, entitled “System and Method for Intelligent Workload Management,” filed on Nov. 25, 2009, the contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference in entirety.[0002]In addition, this application is further related to co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. ______, entitled “System and Method for Intelligent Workload Management,” filed on ______, co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. ______, entitled “System and Method for Recording Collaborative Information Technology Processes in an Intelligent Workload Management System,” filed on ______, co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. ______, entitled “System and Method for Managing Information Technology Models in an Intelligent Workload Management System,” filed on ______, co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. ______, entitled “System and Method for Discovery Enrichment in an...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0013]According to one aspect of the invention, services provisioned in the workload management system may include any suitable combination of physical infrastructure resources and virtualized infrastructure resources. For example, to provision virtualized services that can abstract underlying physical platforms and share computing resources in a manner that may address many needs for immediacy in business environments, the workload management system may manage physical infrastructure resources and virtualized infrastructure resources to support provisioning virtualized services. Thus, the service-oriented architecture employed in the workload management system may enable management for the physical infrastructure resources (e.g., rack-mounting, configuring, and otherwise physically installing servers, storage resources, and other devices), and may further enable management for the virtualized infrastructure resources (e.g., pre-configuring provisioned services with identity management features, denying, flagging, or auditing service requests from unauthorized entities, etc.). Moreover, the workload management system may be considered a service in that the workload management service may be built dynamically in response to service requests (e.g., because a management infrastructure can introduce computational burdens just as any other resource, limiting the existence of the workload management infrastructure to an on-demand service can free computational resources for other tasks having a greater need for immediacy).

[0014]According to one aspect of the invention, to manage collaborative service provisioning in contexts that combine physical and virtualized resources, the workload management system may store a history of interaction between requesters, approvers, and other entities in service provisioning threads, and may further record, log, and save traffic and activity between such entities in the service provisioning threads. As such, various processes that occur during service provisioning may be recorded and injected into a real-time stream that can subsequently be played back, thereby capturing the service provisioning processes as a whole, including any responses that human and / or automated entities may provide during the collaborative process. During processes for collaboratively managing the information technology infrastructure, the workload management system may expose portions of the infrastructure model to entities involved in the management processes. In one implementation, the workload management system may expose “just enough context” to entities involved in the management processes, whereby the involved entities may view the respective portions of the infrastructure model for which such entities have management responsibility (e.g., prior to implementing any particular change to the infrastructure, the workload management system may query the model and determine an impact of the change, notify impacted entities, etc.).

Problems solved by technology

Thus, whereas information technology has traditionally been managed within disparate silos, where context exchanged between any two entities may be lost at the next step in the chain, the model-driven architecture may track context for information technology workloads from start to finish.

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