OpenSAF and alternate solutions: How does

OpenSAF complement other technologies such as

virtualization?

Corey Minyard

Carrier Grade Edition

Architect

MontaVista Software,

LLC

Magic HA Dust

Everyone's goal: Free HA. Just write your application, use standard off-the-shelf hardware and libraries, and sprinkle magic HA dust on it.

Nobody has found any magic HA dust.

Nobody ever will.

Some Past Attempts

Lockstep CPUs

Processors are no longer 100% deterministic

Active-Active (State Machine) Replications

Need a method to bring replicas into sync

Processes must be 100% deterministic – hard with threads

Process Memory Synchronization

High bandwidth

Lack of RT determinism

But mostly... Data sync is only one small part of the problem

Virtualization

Virtualization for HA is like Process Memory Synchronization. Nothing new.

Shoveling all the bits from one machine to another is expensive.

It is a useful tool, but like the others, only one part of the solution.

Besides Data Replication...

H/W management

System monitoring and predictive failure analysis

Security

IPC

Locking

Logging

System configuration

Availability management

Software management

Upgrade (live!)

Post mortem...etc

Service Availability

Why the Focus on Data Replication?

Self-contained, interesting, tractable

Seems to solve most of the problem

An easy distraction from all the other SA issues

OpenSAF

Provides many of the tools required for Service Availability

Portable, modular, holistic solutions

Provides levels of integration for applications

OpenSAF and Virtualization

Not an either-or, but an if-and: If virtualization is appropriate, then OpenSAF and virtualization may be used together for a more complete solution.

Proxies can be used to integrate a virtual machine into the OpenSAF availability framework. Other parts of OpenSAF may be used inside the virtual machine as appropriate.

OpenSAF and Virtualization

OpenSAFVirtual Machine

ProxyComponent

Application

AMF

For instance, a Proxy Component, which is SAF aware, can represent the virtual machine and the application running in it as a component.

More complex systems may require more complex configurations using contained components and such. See the AMF spec for details.

Questions?