A system for remote management of routers in heterogeneous data centers

Abstract

Data center complexity continues to increase and has be- come one of the main barriers to business development and innovation. Heterogeneity is one of the main factors contributing to this complexity. To address this issue, organizations are moving towards manageability standardization by adopting technologies and protocols recommended by the Web Based Enterprise Management specification. However, in the open source arena more solutions leveraging WBEM need to be de- veloped. This paper describes an end-to-end system implementation to manage GNU/Linux based routers using industry standards, which will contribute to the goal of reducing data center complexity. The solution comprises a number of components from a Perl-based user interface to the corresponding CIM schema and providers that instrument the target system to manage routes and interfaces. The entire system was tested in a virtual environment including different virtual networks, servers, and routers. This implementation represents a unique contribution to the open source community.