Systems and methods of autonomic virtual network management

A method of multi-loop autonomic manager, comprising:

• running each step of the diagnosis flowchart as an event, running each connections between the various steps of the diagnostic flowchart as an activity, and accordingly transferring the diagnostic flowchart into an event-driven process block diagram;
• and
• mapping each event in the said event-driven flowchart to an autonomic manager, such that the analysis part and planning part of said autonomic manager can be represented by a set of rules, wherein said rules is realized by complex event processing (CEP) technology;
• said autonomic managers under autonomic computing reference architecture forms a hybrid autonomic computing reference architecture;
• each part of the autonomic managers includes a plurality of instances of CEP engine;
• and each instance contains a plurality of rules.

An intelligent ring-0 contact-point method, comprising:

• monitoring at the process-level by sensors, using multiplexing method so that the monitoring is able to continue even if the number of autonomic manager;
• the said resource manager manages virtual and monitored events exceeds the number of counters of performance monitoring unit;
• monitoring at the system-level by sensors, comprising monitoring translation lookaside buffer miss, PCI bus latency and traffic, CPU stall cycles, memory access latency, device access latency, and cache instruction stall;
• controlling the following activities if effectors are running on an operating system:
• setting the gang algorithm as the method of scheduler so that after rapid determination with process-based rule, the effector activates interrupt of interrupt service routine, controls scheduler to stop, restart, and stop the allocation of time slices of the process until the peak time is passed;
• and
• live-migrating virtual machines if effectors are running on a virtual machine.

A service method to define hardware resources as software, wherein the autonomic manager

• intercepting a plurality of independent concurrent requests;
• mapping the requests to a virtual finite state machine (VFSM);
• calculating the physical resource capacity with the VFSM;
• mapping the ability to a physical machine;
• and
• satisfying the requests by the physical machine eventually.

A method to implement a software-defined server, comprising:

• forming, by physical POD and software-defined server, a client/server architecture according to the autonomic computing reference architecture of autonomic management, wherein the global components of software-defined server have a one-to-one correspondence to the local components of client-side physical POD, to realize a management information base (MIB) of finite state machine, an VFSM executor, a rulebase of VFSM and/or a monitor of VFSM with attributes and states regarding resources;
• calculating, by the software-defined server, the capacity of resources in local net and external network, based on VFSM, wherein the VFSM can be used for system design time or run time;
• calculating capacity and executing events, by VFSM executor, according to the VFSM model method built by satisfied resource state, service quality, and VFSM rules;
• storing, adjusting, and searching rules of VFSM rulebase, by VFSM rule engine, in accordance with the intelligent multi-loop complex event processing method;
• and
• monitoring, by VFSM monitor, the capacity of VFSM with intelligent ring-0 sensors and effectors to prevent overload or over-capacity situations.

A service delivery virtual network system, wherein said virtual network system comprises six parts:

• apparatus of enterprise environmental design and planning, wherein the business design services, interacted with the service process management office, and the business subscription service applications, interacted with the business users, under the business environment, wherein the said apparatus modifies and enhances the service-related strategy/commitment and infrastructure lifecycle management in Telecom Operations Map;
• apparatus of enterprise environmental delivery management operated under the service offline logical environment, wherein the said apparatus modifies and enhances the product lifecycle management and service operations preparation and support (SOP&S) in Telecom Operations Map;
• apparatus of enterprise environment online delivery and operation assurance, operated under the service online-delivery environment and business management part of the application assurance systems, wherein the said apparatus modifies and enhances the service contract fulfillment and service assurance in Telecom Operations Map;
• apparatus of design and planning of IT resources, operated under the resources design services by system administrator, wherein the said apparatus modifies and enhances resource-related policy/commitment and infrastructure life cycle management in Telecom Operations Map;
• apparatus of IT resource delivery management, operated under unallocated virtual and physical resources, wherein the said apparatus modifies and enhances the product life cycle management and resources operations preparation and support (ROP&S) in Telecom Operations Map;
• and
• apparatus of online delivery of IT resources and operations assurance, operated under online delivery environment with already-allocated virtual and physical resources and the resource management part of the application assurance system, wherein said apparatus modifies and enhances the resources contract fulfillment and resource assurance in Telecom Operations Map;
• virtual resources which have been allocated have the preemptive and sharing support of virtual resources;
• said virtual resources aggregate physical resources of different locations and configurations to achieve resource convergence, independent of physical resource types and deployment;
• said physical resources is realized in the data center of enterprise service partition and physical resources network, supporting subscription delivery, and supporting physical resources with space-sharing and time-sharing, including many unassigned and assigned network, storage, and computing physical resources.

An automation method for service delivery virtual network system, comprising:

• scheduling and provisioning user services:
• including requirements design services, system resource analysis services, virtual resource reservation and deployment services for computing, storage, and network resource;
• scheduling and provisioning virtual resource;
• if the resource capacity is insufficient, processing quality-of-service and error service;
• and entering service-delivery service eventually;
• scheduling and provisioning virtual resources:
• including virtual resource allocation, configuration, provisioning services, and software-defined services;
• scheduling and provisioning physical resource;
• if the resource capacity is insufficient, processing quality-of-service and error service;
• entering service-delivery service eventually;
• scheduling and provisioning physical resource:
• accepting commands to configure resources from software-defined service of a resource model via resource model channel;
• realizing resource multiplexing, resource space sharing, and conveying resource notification to software-defined service;
• and
• processing total automation services:
• including application planning and application deployment, automatic resource planning and operations, dynamic provisioning of resources by business, and automatically mapping resources to the physical network and executing immediately.

A virtual network application assurance system of autonomic management, comprising:

• the central acquisition and control system, equivalent to the resource manager at the middle layer of hybrid autonomic computing reference architecture;
• the agent running on managed-resource hosts and hosts, equivalent to the four performance MAPE service components:
• monitor, analyzer, planner, and executor, as well as two contact points:
• sensors and effectors at the bottom layer of managed resources;
• and
• the backend subsystem, equivalent to an integrated console with functions of top-layer orchestrating manager.

A method to implement network application assurance system with the part of autonomic management for virtual network devices, comprising:

• implementing, by frontend subsystem, functions equivalent to management console plus orchestrator of said hybrid autonomic computing reference architecture;
• the alert management, configuration management, and performance management of said function realize the global management of three autonomic elements for middle-layer self-healing, self-configuring and self-optimization;
• the said hybrid autonomic computing reference architecture in the global top-level management subsystem is designed in the frontend subsystem;
• and
• implementing, by central acquisition and control subsystem, functions equivalent to the middle-layer of said hybrid autonomic computing reference architecture;
• During system initialization, the discovery function of network topology automatically finds all the topology information of managed resources in the network, including host, network devices, applications, servers, and databases;
• said topology information is stored in the expert database;
• said expert database features data aggregation, analysis, calculations and fault correlation analysis for three kinds of autonomic elements:
• self-healing, self-configuring and self-optimizing;
• said functions use artificial intelligence methods to implement the functions of orchestrator at the top layer of hybrid autonomic computing reference architecture,
• wherein the hosts of managed resources have full set of local autonomy elements, so that said local autonomic elements enable the hosts to self-manage according to local policies in case of disconnection with the central collection and control system;
• wherein some hosts of managed resources have incomplete autonomic elements which may miss analyzer part, planner part, or knowledge base part such that the host corresponding to said incomplete autonomic elements can not self-manage, but can provide sub-level monitoring for the monitoring part of central acquisition and control system, and can provide sub-level execution for the execution part of the central acquisition and control system.

An autonomic virtual network system, comprising:

• apparatus of autonomic hardware POD;
• apparatus of autonomic software-defined service;
• apparatus of autonomic logical POD, multiplexing resources of software-defined server, and utilizing autonomic management to achieve resource scheduling of push and pull between the logical POD and software-defined server;
• apparatus of service delivery platform (SDP) for autonomic management, including deployment automation, application lifecycle management, business services, and subscription services;
• SDP apparatus utilizes autonomic management to achieve operation-related competition for resources between said SDP server and the server with multiple logical POD;
• SDP apparatus utilizes autonomic management to achieve operation-request-related competition for resources among multiple user agents;
• and
• apparatus of autonomic management user agent, including system administrators, operations personnel, and enterprise service users, and enterprise project management office;
• said user agent possesses intelligent autonomic management capabilities and a graphical interface;
• Wherein the above apparatuses have layers of autonomic management, similar to the layers of classic autonomic computing reference architecture level, but expanded to n-tier from three layers.

A method to implement autonomic management virtual network system, comprising:

• implementing multi-loop autonomic management method;
• implementing virtual network method;
• and
• implementing autonomic virtual network-specific method, comprising session protocol, logical POD service, SDP and cluster topology.