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The SmartDataCenter Glossary

This glossary vocabulary and terminology used to talk about features and aspects of SmartDataCenter (SDC).

adminui

The repository and SDC core service name for the operator portal is "adminui". See Operator Portal.

Agent

Generally-speaking an agent is piece of software that runs "locally", e.g. in a VM or on a server, as part of a larger system. For example, many monitoring systems have an agent that will run in your VMs or on your servers to report issues back to a central service.

In SDC, there are agents running both on compute nodes global zones and in core SDC VMs to assist in providing SDC functionality. An example of the former is the "vm-agent" that runs in every SDC server's global zone and reports VM state to VMAPI. An example of the latter is the "registrar" agent running in each SDC core VM to report back its IP for internal DNS.

At the time of this writing, SDC is moving to having all GZ agents (the former type) be managed as "SAPI services" of type "agent" -- see the Service section below.

See the reference for an overview of agents in SDC.

CN

See compute node.

CoaL

"Cloud on a Laptop" is a VMware virtual appliance providing a full SDC headnode for development and testing. See the README for getting start with SDC using a recent CoaL build.

Compute Node

A node (or physical server) in a SmartDataCenter installation that is not the headnode. Compute nodes are where customer VMs are run.

Global Zone

"Zones" is the term used in SmartOS/Illumos/Solaris and other derivatives to refer to operating system-level virtualized containers. See Wikipedia's Solaris Containers article for a general introduction to zones. The special "global" zone is non-virtualized host for all "non-global" zones.

Borrowing from Jonathan Perkin's post on the SmartOS global zone, two key principles in SmartOS' design govern usage of the global zone:

  • SmartOS is specifically designed as an OS for running Virtual Machines, not as a general purpose OS.
  • The global zone is effectively a read-only hypervisor, and should only be used for creating and managing Virtual Machines. Everything else should be performed inside Virtual Machines.

In SmartDataCenter, which runs SmartOS as its OS on every node, the global zone is only ever used to run operator-owned infrastructure (agents, SMF services) for managing the data center. All customer activity is run in non-global zones.

GZ

See Global Zone.

HN

See headnode.

headnode

The first node (or physical server) setup for a SmartDataCenter installation, and the one that houses the initial instances of all SDC services, is the "headnode" (or HN for short). Typically the headnode is reserved for SDC and operator services, i.e. no customer VMs are run on the headnode. All other nodes are referred to as compute nodes.

Operator Portal

The Operator Portal (a.k.a. adminui) is the Web UI for administering SmartDataCenter. Its repository is sdc-admin.git.

Service

There are two common usages of "service" in SDC:

  1. SAPI services. "SAPI" is a the SDC Service API, the HTTP REST API of record for the core SmartDataCenter components (each called a "service") and instances of those services (called "instances"). For example, the "VMAPI" service is a component of SDC defined in SAPI.

    Furthermore, SAPI defines multiple types of services: "vm" services (e.g. VMAPI, IMGAPI, CloudAPI, etc.) for which an instance is a VM, and "agent" services (e.g. "net-agent" and "vm-agent") for which an instance is an installation in the global zone of a compute node. Sometimes, for historical reasons, usage of "SAPI service" will be referring to only the SAPI services of type "vm".

  2. SMF services. SMF is the SmartOS/illumos/SunOS "Service Management Facility". It is an OS-level facility for process management. All long-running processes that are part of SDC use SMF. An SMF service is identified by its Fault Management Resource Identifier (FMRI), e.g.:

     svc:/smartdc/site/imgapi:default
 svc:/smartdc/site/vmapi:default
 svc:/smartdc/agent/amon-relay:default
 svc:/smartdc/agent/ca/cainstsvc:default
 svc:/smartdc/agent/firewaller:default

    However commonly abbreviated names are used and supported by all the tooling, e.g.

     svcs -x imgapi
 svcadm restart vmapi
 svcadm disable amon-relay