Virtualized Entity Identifier Generation in Distributed Systems
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Solution Overview
Problem
Legacy techniques for managing virtualized entity identifiers in hyperconverged distributed systems often lead to conflicts due to manual specification by users, resulting in duplicate identifiers across clusters, which can cause script failures and incorrect data retrieval.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a system-generated unique entity identifier generation mechanism using a user-specified key, employing a low collision UUID generation algorithm to ensure conflict-free identification, with a VEID mapping table to associate and validate identifiers.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If manual VEID specification is allowed, then ease of operation is improved, but reliability deteriorates due to duplicate identifiers
Solution Approach 1:
The system automatically generates and manages VEIDs without requiring user intervention. The virtualized entity identifier manager creates unique identifiers and maintains the mapping table, allowing the system to serve itself rather than relying on user-specified values that may conflict.
Solution Approach 2:
The virtualized entity identifier manager acts as an intermediary between users and the identifier generation process. Users provide high-level requests (e.g., by specification or key), and the manager translates these into unique VEIDs through the mapping table, preventing conflicts while maintaining user-friendly operation.
2Reliability
If system-generated unique identifiers are used, then reliability is improved, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The identifier management function is segmented into a dedicated virtualized entity identifier manager component. This separates the complexity of unique identifier generation and conflict prevention from the rest of the system, allowing other components to use simple VEIDs without needing to understand the underlying uniqueness mechanism.
Solution Approach 2:
The system creates a mapping table that copies and stores the relationship between user specifications/keys and generated VEIDs. This allows the system to maintain reliability through the mapping table while presenting a simple interface to users, abstracting away the complexity of unique identifier generation.
3Ease of manufacture
If manual VEID assignment is permitted, then ease of manufacture is improved, but loss of information increases due to identifier conflicts
Solution Approach 1:
The system provides feedback by automatically generating VEIDs based on user specifications or keys and maintaining the mapping table. This feedback mechanism ensures that even if users attempt to specify identifiers, the system resolves conflicts and provides consistent, unique identifiers, preventing information loss.
Solution Approach 2:
The virtualized entity identifier manager performs preliminary action by pre-generating and assigning unique VEIDs before they are needed in the system. This prevents identifier conflicts from arising in the first place, ensuring that when VEs are created or migrated, their identifiers are already resolved and valid.
Data Source
AI summary
A method embodiment serves to manage entity names for virtualized entities in a computing system comprising two or more computing nodes that host virtual machines and other virtual entities. The method commences upon receiving a request for identifiers. The request includes an identifier key that is used by a name generator. The name generator implements a deterministic algorithm that will always return the same outputs given the same inputs. The name generator generates a user- or program-specified number of virtualized entity identifiers based on the identifier key. The generated virtualized entity identifiers and corresponding identifier keys are stored in an identifier mapping table that is accessible by the two or more computing nodes. The identifier mapping table describes relationships between the virtualized entity identifiers and corresponding identifier keys. The virtualized entity identifiers are used to create respective virtualized entities. The identifier mapping table can be shared between multiple computing clusters.