Dynamic Appliances
How do Dynamic Appliances work?
AppLogic replaces expensive and difficult to integrate IT infrastructure such as firewalls, load balancers, servers and SANs with pre-integrated and pre-tested virtual appliances. Each appliance runs in its own virtual environment that boots it’s own Linux OS and appears as a separate physical server to the software that runs inside the appliance. AppLogic’s catalog appliances are built using leading open-source infrastructure like Fedora Linux, Apache, MySQL, JBoss and many others. Users can modify catalog appliances or build their own appliances from scratch.
Some Examples
One of the first Dynamic Appliances 3Tera has created is called BCK; it is their backup enabler Dynamic Appliance. You simply dragging a copy of BCK into an AppLogic application and then setting the schedule, number of backup copies to keep, and the backup location. The application will now be able to carry out its own backups with no operator intervention. It really is that simple.
Another powerful concept in Data Center management is the Patch Management Dynamic Appliance. This appliance manages the roll-out and roll-back of new virtual appliance code by monitoring the versions of appliances in the AppLogic catalog and comparing those to the versions of the appliances in your application. If a catalog update is detected you are prompted to confirm the upgrade. When the upgrade is finished the Patch Management Dynamic Appliance will automatically restart the now up to date appliance.
Portability
An important feature of Dynamic Appliances is their portability. When you make a copy of an applications or move it to a different data center (yes, all of this is possible with a single command in AppLogic), the new copy of the application preserves the operational capabilities on the Dynamic Appliance.
What can I do with Dynamic Appliances?
More or less anything you can think of. One of the most advanced concepts is the MIG Self Migration Enabler. This Dynamic Appliance enables AppLogic applications to take snapshots of themselves and migrate from one AppLogic grid to another automatically. This solution could be used in conjunction with the Power Saver Dynamic Appliance to free up the energy demand at one data center by dynamically and automatically moving AppLogic applications to an AppLogic grid at another data center.
Can users create their own Dynamic Appliances?
Absolutely! 3Tera provides all of the technical documentation and libraries required to implement custom Dynamic Appliances. They are even making the source code of all of their own Dynamic Appliance such as the Backup and Power Saver Dynamic Appliance available as examples to be built on and extended.
The future of Dynamic Appliances
3Tera envisions a whole range of standard Dynamic Appliances that will be available in the AppLogic appliance catalog that will make data center operations much simpler and easier. Combined with customer and consultant generated Dynamic Appliances we see a new era in data center operations emerging. This is 3Tera’s vision: A self managing virtualized data center infrastructure that makes configuration, provisioning, and management far more efficient and effective than it is today. 3Tera’s Dynamic Appliances are a key step in this evolution.