Automated discovery and inventory of nodes within an autonomic distributed computing system

A distributed computing system comprising:

• a plurality of application nodes interconnected via a network;
• a database that stores a model that defines an organization for the distributed computing system;
• and
• a control node that detects the addition of a node to the network and automatically identifies hardware attributes for the detected node, wherein the control node comprises an inventory service that network boots the detected node with an inventory software image when the control node detects the addition of the node, wherein the inventory software image primarily includes an executable inventory process for identifying hardware attributes of the detected node, wherein the inventory process executes on the detected node to automatically identify the hardware attributes for the detected node and sends the identified hardware attributes from the detected node to the control node for storage within the model, wherein the control node updates the model to store the identified hardware attributes for the detected node and automatically deploys the detected node within the distributed computing system in accordance with the model based on the identified hardware, and automatically loads a software image onto the detected node to replace the inventory software image and provide a computing environment for execution of user software applications.

A computer-readable medium comprising instructions that cause a processor to:

• store a model within a database of a control node, wherein the model defines an organization of a distributed computing system having a plurality of computing nodes;
• automatically detect the addition of a node to a network;
• network boot the detected node with an inventory software image upon detecting the addition of the node, wherein the inventory software image includes an executable inventory process for identifying hardware attributes of the detected node;
• execute the inventory process on the detected node to automatically identify the hardware attributes for the detected node and to send the identified hardware attributes from the detected node to the control node for storage within the model;
• update the model to store the identified hardware attributes for the detected node;
• and
• automatically deploy the detected node within the distributed computing system in accordance with the model based on the identified hardware attributes, wherein the instructions that cause the processor to automatically deploying the detected node comprise instructions that cause the processor to automatically load a software image onto the detected node to replace the inventory software image and provide a computing environment for execution of user software applications.