Event-Driven Management Automation in the ALBM Cluster System

Abstract

One of major concerns on using a large-scale cluster system is manageability. The ALBM (Adaptive Load Balancing and Management) cluster system is an active cluster system that is scalable, reliable and manageable. We introduce the event-driven management automation by using the ALBM active cluster system. This architecture is based on an event management solution that is composed of event notification service, event channel service and event rule engine. Critical system state changes are generated as events and delivered to the event rule engine. According to the predefined management rules, some management actions are performed when a specific condition is satisfied. This event-driven mechanism can be used to manage the system automatically without human intervention. This event management solution can also be used for other advance management purpose, such as event correlation, root cause analysis, trend analysis or capacity planning. In order to support the management automation possibility, the experimental results are presented by comparing adaptive load balancing with non-adaptive load balancing mechanism. The adaptive scheduling algorithm that uses the event management automation results in a better performance compared to the non-adaptive ones for a realistic heavy-tailed workload. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2004.