Unused resource recognition in real time for provisioning and management of fabric-backplane enterprise servers

• US 8,145,785 B1
• Filed: 02/12/2005
• Issued: 03/27/2012
• Est. Priority Date: 02/13/2004
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Oracle International Corporation (Oracle Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Habanero Holdings Incorporated
• Inventors: Finkelstein, Yuri, Ingrao, Fabio Onofrio, Nicolaou, Cosmos, Saraiya, Nakul Pratap, Hanson, Geoffrey H., Griffen, Jeffrey Lloyd
• Primary Examiner(s): Nguyen, Tammy
• Assistant Examiner(s): Cox, Natisha
• Application Number:
  US11/057,038
• Time in Patent Office: 2,600 Days
• Field of Search: 709/233
• US Class Current: 709/233
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 49/357 Fibre channel switches
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 49/45 Arrangements for providing or supporting expansion
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 49/602 Multilayer or multiprotocol switching, e.g. IP switching
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 49/70 Virtual switches

Abstract

Real time provisioning and management of fabric-backplane enterprise servers includes monitoring system status and configuration, displaying monitoring results, accepting user commands, and providing hardware and software management and configuration commands to the system. In one embodiment, an event is generated when a pluggable module is inserted into the system. In response to the event, the availability of the pluggable module is displayed to a system operator, and the operator enters a command to provision a server that includes the pluggable module. The server provisioning command is processed, resulting in a hardware configuration command being issued to the system, and an event indicating a status associated with processing the command is returned. The recognition of the inserted module, the display to the operator, and the processing of the server provisioning command occur in real time.

Claims

1. A method comprising:

receiving notification of an unused configurable computational primitive;

receiving an instruction to form a computational and networking system according to an enumeration of desired computational and networking system qualities;

programming configuration state included in the configurable computational primitive according to the enumeration; and

wherein the configurable computational primitive comprises at least a first portion of a plurality of physically partitionable symmetric multiprocessors, and at least a portion of the configuration state specifies selective hardware isolation of the first portion with respect to a second portion of the physically partitionable symmetric multiprocessors, the selective hardware isolation comprising selectively configuring one or more shared memory coherency and cache memory coherency links between the first and the second portions for isolated operation.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the notification is provided in real time.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein the notification comprises a description of qualities of the configurable computational primitive.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein the configurable computational primitive is included in a pluggable module.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein:

the computational and networking system is a first computational and networking system; and

the notification is responsive to releasing the configurable computational primitive from a second computational and networking system.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein the instruction is provided by an automatic agent.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein the instruction is provided by a human.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein the enumeration comprises desired computing qualities.

9. The method of claim 1, wherein the enumeration comprises desired networking qualities.

10. The method of claim 1, wherein the enumeration comprises desired input/output qualities.

11. The method of claim 1, wherein the enumeration comprises desired storage qualities.

12. The method of claim 1, wherein:

the configurable computational primitive comprises configuration control circuitry; and

the configuration control circuitry is responsive to configuration control state derived from the configuration state.

13. The method of claim 1, further comprising executing an application program in part using resources of the configurable computational primitive.

14. A system comprising:

a configurable computational primitive;

a management computational primitive to execute management software;

the management software comprising functions comprising

receiving notification that the configurable computational primitive is unused,

receiving an instruction to form a computational and networking system according to an enumeration of desired computational and networking system qualities,

programming configuration state included in the configurable computational primitive according to the enumeration; and

wherein the configurable computational primitive comprises at least a first portion of a plurality of physically partitionable symmetric multiprocessors, and at least a portion of the configuration state specifies selective hardware isolation of the first portion with respect to a second portion of the physically partitionable symmetric multiprocessors, the selective hardware isolation comprising selectively configuring one or more shared memory coherency and cache memory coherency links between the first and the second portions for isolated operation.

15. The system of claim 14, wherein the notification is provided in real time.

16. The system of claim 14, wherein the notification comprises a description of at least one quality of the configurable computational primitive.

17. The system of claim 14, wherein the configurable computational primitive is included in a pluggable module.

18. The system of claim 14, wherein:

the computational and networking system is a first computational and networking system; and

the notification is responsive to releasing the configurable computational primitive from a second computational and networking system.

19. The system of claim 14, wherein the instruction is provided by an automatic agent.

20. The system of claim 14, wherein the instruction is provided by a human.