Providing Open Architecture High Availability Solutions

The Intelligent Platform Management Interface is an industry standard method that provides a

means by which hardware-based system components may report health status information. This

allows a system to be monitored even if it is not fully functional or operational. Implementing IPMI

requires specialized hardware, typically including a separate microprocessor or microcontroller,

which is used to gather, maintain, and report system status to a remote device.

Alternate Methods. Any method by which a system component may communicate with the

system manager will provide a means by which Health Status Information may be conveyed.

Message passing, queuing, semaphores, and shared memory are some examples of alternate

methods of communication.

5.4.6 Dependencies

External communications are constrained by the requirements of the external management system.

All communications are constrained by the communications media contained in the system and the

traffic bandwidth of that media.

5.5 Management Interfaces

5.5.1 Introduction

Implementations of this HA system model typically have multiple management interfaces that

support different functions and facilitate different types of action.

Interprocess. At the most fundamental level there is a primitive management interface between

processes. From a functional perspective, this information is ‘in-band’ and includes information

like error and return codes. This interface communicates status and control information and should

use open-standard API and methods, when available. This interface usually supports very terse

context and information content.

Interlayer. In the system model there is a need to communicate Health, Status and State

information from one layer to another, for instance from the hardware to the OS layer. The

Management Middleware, which provides immediate configuration and fault management of the

system, is a specific form of this interface. Depending upon the need and method of request, the

context and information content can vary from terse to extremely detailed information content.

External Management. The administration of the system typically involves layers of different

management functions, context views, requirements and management objectives. These

management interfaces could include one or more of the following types:

• Network or Element. This is typically a structured remote network management schema that

defines the management interfaces, communications, elements and Management entities

(which are often multi-tiered).

• Local Administrative. Most network elements have some form of local administrative

management interface. They are used to provide information and may provide control access

to system components. Such an interface can be as simply as blink (or beep) sequence,

equipment-specific LED’s, local alarms, remote alarms (email, pager, landline call), system

console, or other trade interface (TL1, or local browser support).