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Glossary
Guest Operating System (GOS) The Systems installed and running inside of a virtual machine.
HA - High availability is the ability of redundant components to fail over the other if one should stop working
Host Bus Adapter (HBA) A Hardware adapter card that connects the host to a device, e.g., a SCSI disk, an array of SCSI disks, or a storage area network using Fibre Channel or iSCSI technologies.
Host Channel Adapter (HCA) is the adapter/interface between a computer and an InfiniBand network
Host Operating System The operating system installed on the physical server that is running the virtualization software.
HPCC High-performance computing clusters are used for HPC applications that are cluster-aware-, that is, they can distribute the application workload across a number of systems or processors to get the work done more quickly and efficiently than on a single system/processor. In addition to the attributes of HPC, HPCC requires inter processor communications (IPC) capability across high-speed interconnect such as 10GbE, InfiniBand, or Myrinet
Hypervisor (also, virtual machine monitor) A thin , guest-OS-independent virtualization layer that is loaded onto bare metal, which interacts with the hardware directly and creates virtual machines in which operating systems, either enlightened or not, can run. The hypervisor virtualizes hardware resources, such as memory and CPUs, for the different virtual machines (VMs) and their guest operating systems.
InfiniBand A scalable, high speed, switched fabric network, often used in HPCC due to its high bandwidth. InfiniBand (IB) switch modules are available for a number of blade systems. Servers connect to an IB network through a host channel adapter (HCA).
IPoIB Internet Protocol over InfiniBand is IP packets encapsulated in the InfiniBand data link layer, allowing computers on an IB networks to communicate to IP devices.
IPMI- The Intelligent Platform Management Interface is a set of specifications created by a consortium of platform vendors which provides a set of low-level protocols and data records used to provide out-of -band manageability and access to hardware-management information via a set of in-band application programming interfaces.
LDAP Lightweight Directory Access Protocol is an application protocol for querying and modifying directory services running over TCP/IP.
Logical Unit Number (LUN)- An address of a disk or storage device. The term is used to describe SCSI disk identifiers as well as logical volumes in storage networks.
LUN masking- Done by host bus adapters in cooperation with software in the server, LUN masking works by restricting the logical unit numbers (LUNs) for which operating system commands are accepted.
Multi-pathing software- Server-resident software that manages a server's use of multiple paths to a storage device. Typically this is implemented to improve resilience and protect against failure in the storage network.
NAS- Network attached storage allows systems to access and share files ver an IP network using the CIFS protocol for Microsoft Windows and NFS for UNIX and Linux protocols. NAS devises contain disks (usually RAID disks), and a very thin server that specializes in maintaining files systems intelligence and fast access to data at the file level.
NFS- Network File System is a UDP- or TCP/IP-based protocol for accessing files on a remoter system (or NAS storage device) as if they were local files. Most often used with UNIX or Linux.
NIC- A network interface card is the component that connects a server to a network. Typically, blade servers come standard with redundant 1Gb Ethernet NICs. These can be upgraded to 10GbE and can have a TCP Offload Engine (TOE) option for improving the speed of communication with high-speed LANs or iSCSI SANs.
N_Port ID Virtualization or NPIV is a Fibre Channel facility allowing multiple N_Port IDs to share a single single physical N_Port. This allows multiple Fibre Channel initiators to occupy a single physical port, easing hardware requirements in Storage area network design, especially where virtual SANs are called for. NPIV is defined by the Technical Committee T11.
Paravirtualization- Virtualization approach in which the guest operating systems are modified to know they are running in a virtual environment and interface with a special API to communicate with the virtualization layer, allowing performance to be significantly improved. The performance benefits, however, must be weighted against the need to modify the guest operating system.
PXE- Preboot Execution Environment boot allows a server to boot over a network (as long as your’re using DHCP), allowing servers to be diskless and retrieve their boot image from the network. Created as part of a bigger initiative from Intel called Wired for Management (WfM), which was introduced in 1998 to improve the manageability of desktop, mobile, and server systems.
Scale-out- Server architecture in which more servers are added to a group of servers sharing a workload, for example in a webserver farm or through a cluster.
Scale-up- Server architecture in which more compute power is added within a server to handle more workload
SOAP- SOAP (originally Simple Object Access Protocol lately also
Service Oriented Architecture Protocol) is a protocol for exchanging XML-based messages over computer networks, normally using HTTP. SOAP forms the foundation layer of the Web services stack, providing a basic messaging framework that more abstract layers can build on.
Virtual Dedicated Server- Another term for virtual private server, the virtual dedicated server allows users to have a dedicated server, despite the fact that their virtual server is on the same machine as other virtual dedicated servers.
Virtualization- The term virtualization refers to the abstraction of a computer’s physical resources so that it ‘hides’ physical characteristics from the applications, software and end users who interact with the machine.
Virtual Machine- It is a self-contained operating environment that behaves as if it is a separate computer. A virtual machine emulated a complete hardware system, including the processor, network adapter, removable drives, peripherals, and other devices. Multiple virtual machines configured with different guest operating system are capable of operating on the same host server simultaneously.
Zoning- Done by the fabric in a Fibre Channel SAN, zoning has a similar effect to that of HBA-based LUN masking. A tape drive’s port address is added to the fabric zone that contains the server that will control the backup operation and the online storage device that is the source for the data to be copied. If zones in the SAN of which other servers are part are configured so that the tape drive is not a part of the, those servers will experience no response to messages sent to the tape drive’s port address.
Glossary sources:
Advanced Server Virtualization (Marshall, Reynolds, McCrory)
Blade Servers and Virtualization (Goldworm, Skamarock)
Storage Area Networks (Barker, Massiglia)
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