VLS: Simulated system management test infrastructure as a service

Abstract

Operational cost can account up to 70% of the total IT budget of an enterprise. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for an enterprise scale data center is significantly dependent upon type and quality of the system management solutions deployed. Providing an uniform management solution for heterogeneous set of devices interconnected inside and across data centers that are geographically distributed is a major requirement from all large scale enterprises. Given the limited resources of testing infrastructure, verification of proper operation as well as automated validation of system management software poses a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose a simulation framework, namely VLS (Virtual Lab. Service), offered as a service to address this challenge. Our tool provides simulation for a wide variety of data center configurations that are used by system management solution developers and testers. VLS provides simulated IT infrastructure based on declarative input specification while keeping in mind the current paradigm of sharing and reservation mechanism followed by teams to access lab. equipments over Wide Area Network (WAN). We deployed this service in our lab. environment for testing of two popular storage management suites and present one of our case study to demonstrate these capabilities. © 2010 IEEE.